A leading big box retailer sought to do battle with online competitors like Amazon. However, the current store-based supplier onboarding process was too complicated, resulting in turnaround times of over 4 weeks. Our team was tasked with delivering a system that would onboard new suppliers in as little as 24 hours.
How might we help our client do business at the speed of its competition?
My role
I led the UX Design through two rounds of redesigns for a supplier portal built on SAP, working with a client UX Principal Designer counterpart to build wireframes/interactive prototypes and conduct usability studies. During the second redesign I mentored a senior technology consultant new to UX through the UX design and delivery process.
Waging guerilla research
The project was run as a “traditional” technology package implementation with no dedicated research hours budgeted in the project plan, so I had to get by on whatever scraps of user insight I could find. I kicked off the journey towards a more human-centric approach by conducting usability studies on the current system to discover pain points. In addition to qualitative feedback, research participants completed timed tasks and filled out a modified version of the System Usability Scale (SUS) survey to come up with quantitative usability metrics. This established a baseline for the previous design that we could measure our success against.
The most frequent pain points we observed were that users lacked a sense of where they were in the process and were often unfamiliar with the specialized terms used by the business. However, the entire system was riddled with flaws that prolonged and complicated the user experience.
It’s not all about the looks
User experience improvements aren’t limited to the interfaces of the technology systems being redesigned. The current supplier onboarding process was based on a brick-and-mortar store model where considerable upfront time and effort was spent making sure that anything that hit the shelves had been vetted thoroughly. However, with the extra security came additional delays, adding weeks to time between initial registration and finally being able to do business.
We were able to eliminate business process steps by requiring less user data up front and selectively eliminating steps based on the business type (for example, pure eCommerce suppliers would not need to undergo a factory inspection). False positives would be managed through a robust exception process.
Designing and testing iteratively
With a streamlined process in place, I then started exploring various designs to address aforementioned pain points. These early concepts focused on finding ways to make the system feel approachable and giving the user a sense of visibility.
I also established the practice of running lightweight user testing on the designs in progress in order to move towards a more Agile way of working. The feedback from user testing allowed us to adjust the design as needed before development of the system started.
Sample interactive prototype (coming soon)Axure as a prototyping tool
Axure was the wireframing and interactive prototyping tool used for this project. The dynamic panels and ability to create powerful open-ended flows in Axure were a boon during our user testing sessions, but we also ran into some of its limitations as a prototyping tool. In addition to the relative inefficiency of synchronizing changes across multiple instances, the lack of customizability for certain standard UI elements (e.g. checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns) resulted in the need to create separate redlines for the development team. I have since moved mostly to Sketch for conveying visual design, but Axure’s powerful page interactions and ability to create stateful page flows keep it a useful tool for testable prototypes requiring complex data.
A guide for the lost business owner
In order to address the largest pain point of user confusion in the process, we reimagined the onboarding experience as a wizard to help guide the supplier through the steps of the process. Additionally, we avoided jargon and used a conversational tone of voice to make the system more approachable.
For the small wins
The improved usability of the redesigned system was also the combination of many small enhancements to improve learnability and efficiency while reducing errors. Small tweaks such as hiding unneeded fields and progressively disclosing them as necessary prevented user overload, while other features such as auto-save and client-side error checking improved forgiveness and reduced user errors.
One small step forward
Using the two-pronged approach of process and usability improvements, we came up with a design that achieved the desired 24-hour turnaround. The redesigned system successfully went live with US online suppliers, and I subsequently oversaw the design of an expanded system for a global rollout to US, UK, and Canada suppliers.
Continuing the good fight
While we saw a clear improvement in business and user outcomes as a result of the redesign, shipping once isn’t the end of the journey, and there was still much room to grow towards becoming a designful organization. I used the usability reports of the redesigned system to highlight returns on UX as well as identify additional opportunity areas for improvement to client leadership. Showing off these wins built support and allowed me to incorporate additional user research via interviews, wireframing and interactive prototyping earlier in the functional design phase for the subsequent round of system enhancements.
Building a design practice
In addition to my project delivery role, I also helped develop the client team’s UX capabilities as they continued to build out their practice. One major focus of mine was a major revamp of the existing static style guide, which was both non-comprehensive and hard to understand. I pushed an initiative to transform it into a living style guide with code snippets to improve the UX handoff process, which had been causing major friction between UX designers and front-end developers on projects. Additionally, I started development on a shared Axure widget library and proposed standards and governance to improve the consistency of UX delivery across projects.