Business partner experience
Design
Simplifying the purchase of Systems Hardware from a large vendor
DURATION
May 2016 - April 2020
MY ROLE
Lead product designer
TEAM
• Product owners
• Business partner relationship owners
• Business analysts
• Developers
CLIENT
Large, globally distributed IT organization
Highlights
• Worked with business partner relationship owners and business analysts to understand business partner roles, tasks and goals
• Designed an improved experience that enabled users to easily enter and track their orders using well organized and intuitive views
• Created a process overview guide for business partners to help them navigate the vendor’s ecosystem of tools
Problem
How to make it simple and fast for business partners to order Systems Hardware products for their customers.
Project goals
• Make it easy and quick for business partners to enter orders that are valid from a pricing and configuration standpoint, as well as create other types of administrative requests.
• Allow business partners to track their submitted orders and requests.
• Facilitate communication between business partner and vendor while orders and requests are being processed.
• Allow business partner team members to easily share order information with each other
Challenges
• When business partners place orders there are several elements that need to be populated and validated. These include multiple addresses, complex product configurations, pricing and discount arrangements, identification of secondary business partners, and more.
• Besides placing orders, business partners also submit many types of requests for purposes like reporting damaged goods, updating inventory, or asking a question. These all need to be managed and tracked easily.
• Communication between the vendor and the business partners needs to be facilitated when questions arise about orders.
• Business partner organizations vary in size, operating differently as to the user roles and division of work. There are also differences globally as to the information that an order must contain. The design must work across these varied user audiences and geographies.
• Although business partner feedback was used to help drive the requirements, some members of the team objected to conducting more comprehensive user research directly with the business partners.
To comply with NDA, I have intentionally hidden and replaced content in this case study.
Process
Advocated for a user research based approach, while providing extensive design support for the identified requirements.
Within the project constraints, I did the following:
• Provided strong leadership and guidance to refine the requirements, asking questions to understand user goals and scenarios.
• Worked with the business analysts and business partner relationship owners to learn about the user roles, objectives and scenarios, to help inform my work. Provided suggested research questions to ask business partner users.
• Employed Design Thinking to elaborate on user role characteristics and tasks.
• Offered alternative design approaches, including simplified solutions.
• Created mockups and prototypes to visualize design solutions based on UI design principles.
• Conducted design playbacks with the cross-disciplinary team, which helped identify issues and spawn ideas.
• Advocated for establishing a structured user research plan, opening up customer feedback channels, and establishing UX metrics.
Discovery
I worked with those on the team who had direct contact with users in order to understand the needs of the business partners and to share ideas.
Questions
Examples of suggested questions that I provided to explore with business partners:
What events or situations cause you to visit the business partner order application?
What events or situations cause you to visit the business partner order application?
What are the most common reasons that you would want to view an order after it has been submitted?
What information would you use most often to look up or find an existing order?
Have you had difficulty in the past finding an existing order? Could you share an example?
How often do you view the same order more than once?
How often do you view the same order more than once?
What are your biggest pain points with regard to orders?
What is the most time consuming part of placing an order?
User needs that we identified
Business partners needed a unified experience built around their task needs rather than based on the business processes and tooling of the vendor.
Alerts
Business partners needed to know when the vendor required more information or for them to make changes to their order.
Tracking
The ability to quickly find an order and determine its status was needed.
Efficiency
Business partners were faced with a long order form, including multiple types of addresses, complex configurations, pricing and other order classification options.
Help with resolving issues
Users needed support for overcoming pricing and configuration issues that they encountered while placing an order.
Organization
Orders could be followed by submission of related requests for shipment / delivery, missing parts or other purposes. Business partners needed to be able to tie the requests to the orders to which they relate..
Support for teams
Depending on the size of the business partner organization, a team of users might be involved in a single order. Order event notifications needed to be sent to all members of that team, for example to help with vacation coverage scenarios.
Re-use
Business partners needed a way to re-use previously entered information from past orders to save time.
Systems integration
To complete a transaction, business partners needed to navigate a disjointed set of tools in order to complete tasks such as obtaining a price, creating a hardware configuration or obtaining status of their shipment.
Design
I sought to understand the intent behind each requirement. In creating the design, my goal was to meet user needs through well organized views, familiar and descriptive labeling, easy to consume layout, clear interaction and helpful navigation.
Exploration
Early sketches
I looked at ideas for content organization, interaction and navigation. One idea was that of allowing users to surface comment trails directly within the order list.
Later ideas we considered
I explored a number of ideas with the team to address user needs. These provided a vision for how the application could evolve.
Managing addresses for order creation
When creating an order, business partners had to supply 4 different addresses: their own address along with 3 for the end customer they were selling to. I worked with a business analyst to explore ways that we could minimize data entry and support easy maintenance of customer addresses. This included populating addresses based on the history of previous orders for the same customer.
Breaking up the long order form into a multi-step process
The order form required multiple types of addresses, hardware configurations, and order classification options, resulting in a long form of some complexity. I presented the idea to the team of breaking this form into a series of smaller steps, allowing the user to focus on one aspect at a time, while providing a better sense of overall progress towards the goal.
Supporting key tasks
Viewing order details
Orders are displayed in a well organized tabular view, with an easy to read layout and key actions highlighted at top right.
Creating other types of requests
Business partners can place requests in order to report damaged items, request urgent shipment, update inventory, ask questions, and for other purposes. I created a menu and provided text for the descriptions in order to help users identify the appropriate option.
.
Resolving configuration errors
Understanding how to resolve configuration validation problems was a challenge for users. I improved the way messages were displayed within the configuration section to better convey the severity of an issue, while also adding tips on how to resolve issues.
Providing process guidance
The Systems Hardware Orders site sits within a larger ecosystem of related tools. I worked with a business partner relationship subject matter expert to create empathy maps for the key business partner roles. We also created a landing page to guide business partners as to which tool they should use at each step in the sales process.
Detailed design
I worked with the business analysts and business partner relationship owners to gain understanding of user needs and tasks scenarios. I focused on providing navigation to tie related functions together, organizing content for quick scanning, and providing intuitive descriptions and labeling. Through design playbacks, I encouraged team reflection. And I continued to advocate for increasing the level of user research to include formal methods.
Results
A new modern web application was deployed to business partners, providing them great value through an intuitive and easy-to-navigate experience.
The new app. is seamless and key part of the vendor’s Order Management experience web application that was created to eliminate technical limitations and process complexity from previous applications by providing a new modern creative solution that aggregates great value to the vendor and clients.
It was built based on business partner feedback, an intuitive and friendly user experience interface. This powerful tool easily allows the vendor’s business partners and sellers to submit orders ranging from simple to most complex deals. Design thinking and agile methodologies are being used to deliver new features every 2 weeks, bringing a constant evolution and extending the functionalities of this tool pleasing the clients and increasing their productivity. As of the time I left the project, the team also had agreed to do (formal) user research in follow-up to my advocating for this approach.
What others say
Recognition
“We have built a great application together and your contribution has been fundamental.”
Andrea Calza
Silver Stevie Winner
IVR or Web Service Solution - New Version.
Global Transformation Leader, Quote to Cash Systems Hardware
Reflection
The need to prioritize user involvement despite obstacles, the need for streamlined education materials to help teams adopt new collaborative design methods.
Here are some takeaways that I have:
Identify new ways to enable user research
I have come away motivated to place even more priority on focusing teams on involving users early and often, and to find new ways to overcome barriers to doing so, including through persuasive examples and the early establishment of user experience metrics.
Provide consumable design process guidance
I want to utilize simple and easy to follow visual guides to help teams learn and follow a full design process, including regular collaborative design sessions and playbacks.
Acknowledgements
Business owner
Product manager
Business partner relationship owner
Business partner relationship owner
Business analyst
Business analyst
Development lead
Developer
Patty Lally
Andrea Calza
Rob Moody
Teresa Peck
Zuzana Ulicna
Denner Abrao Siqueira Filho
Maria Jose Calderoni
Francisco Javier Sainz Ozegueda