Dropship price lists acts as a driver in facilitating trade between sellers and new partners, enabling transactional engagement and serving as a primary catalyst for boosting Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), a key business metric.
Creating price lists on the Convictional platform is the last and most important step for sellers to become transactional after establishing a dropship partnership with new partners. The experience was cumbersome, had significant usability issues, and was a heavy support burden for the team.
Heavy cognitive load, confusing or irrelevant options.
Hard to manage and update pricing, no bulk editing.
Inconsistent labeling and data formatting.
Address error prevention and recovery, system feedback and other heuristic shortcomings.
Increase conversion rates and decrease TTC by optimizing UX and fixing usability issues to generate more GMV.
Reduce support ticket volume by making the process more intuitive and user friendly.
Create alignment with newly created design system.
Plagued with a high volume of support ticket requests, our team had already developed a keen awareness of numerous areas for improvement within the price list creation flow. Our Support team did an exceptional job documenting and effectively communicating these issues back to the Product team.
My initial step involved gathering extensive historical context by meticulously filtering through our internal data and documentation. This process aimed to capture significant themes pertaining to the most common challenges faced by users and to identify key features that could potentially facilitate their business growth.
Furthermore, recognizing the need for a deeper understanding of the challenges and pain points associated with price list creation, I decided to engage a cohort of sellers on our platform. Through individual 30-minute chat sessions, I had the opportunity to pose relevant questions, capture their insights, and gather additional findings and feedback. Additionally, I deemed it valuable to conduct internal interviews with our Customer Success team, given their regular interactions with our users. Their unique perspective and firsthand experiences provided valuable insights into the problem space.
Following the interviews, I created a Figjam file organize sticky notes documenting all the user pain points and feature requests that I had gathered. This exercise led us to establish a "theoretical maximum," representing the envisioned ideal end state for the price list creation process. Additionally I spoke with our staff engineer to gain insights into technical challenges that we might encounter in an experience redesign.
There was not a good use of whitespace and overall layout. Users would like more visualizations clustered together for better analysis because it could help uncover additional revenue opportunities.
Users needed a better display of data trends over time. Day over day and month over month comparisons with granular filtering would be helpful and make the experience of comparative analytics more insightful.
It was hard to process tabular data or views where data is too dense. Users need better ways to summarize top line KPI’s that are more readable and empower them to dive deeper depending on their individual needs.
There was too much manual effort required to piece together various data points to tell a holistic advertising narrative. Considerations should be taken to aggregate the right pieces of data together which would save vast amounts of time.
To establish clear design goals and guide the design process, our team defined the metrics to measure the effectiveness of the redesigned experience. This data-informed approach not only set specific objectives but also facilitated effective communication of the value and rationale behind design decisions.
Upon defining the metrics, I collaborated with the data team to develop dedicated reporting dashboards focused on Price Lists. These dashboards provided valuable insights for the entire team, enabling us to track the progress of our continuous delivery improvement strategy.
A crucial aspect of the redesign was addressing the user frustration around managing large data sets and pricing strategies without the use of CSV data. While importing and exporting pricing was perceived as vital by our users, I challenged this assumption. I sought to explore alternative approaches, such as automation and integrations, to alleviate manual efforts and enhance the experience.
This exploration led to the identification of key design principles that guided my process: simplicity, intuitiveness, flexibility, and user control. These principles became the cornerstone of the design, ensuring a user-centric and empowering experience.
As an integral part of the design process, I believe that the utilization of the "How Might We" (HMW) framework plays a vital role in attaining enhanced design outcomes. This framework effectively facilitates a shift from a problem-focused mindset to a solution-oriented approach, empowering designers to think more creatively and holistically. By employing open-ended questions that begin with "How might we," designers actively stimulate creativity, maintain a strong focus on addressing user needs, and foster collaborative efforts.
To guide my design choices, my subsequent step involved organizing, reflecting upon, and extracting the primary themes of pain points. This process aimed to distill them further into solution-oriented opportunities. By employing the "How Might We" (HMW) approach for each pain point theme, I swiftly generated new ideas through brainstorming sessions.
After an extensive brainstorming session exploring various ways to make impactful design decisions, I decided to regroup with the team. My goal was to present a diverse range of potential solutions and gather input on the effort required for implementation, as well as the immediate value and impact achievable within shorter timeframes. To aid this assessment, I created a matrix to assign effort levels and evaluate the potential impact of each opportunity.
The existing price list creation interaction model made numerous assumptions about user preferences and product distribution models, resulting in an overly rigid and convoluted process that included irrelevant inputs for most users. My challenge was to transform this complex journey, filled with user-defined options and preferences, into a simple and intuitive experience.
While dissecting the different user paths towards creating a more comprehensive and adaptable price list that caters to various market scenarios, I came to the realization that each path consisted of five distinct buckets of options that were essential steps to successfully completing a new price list: A user needed to decide on
During this process, I discovered through additional conversations and ideation that my initial hypothesis of eliminating the need for users to manage pricing through CSVs would be limiting and unsupportive of most users' pre-existing workflows. However, it became evident that we would still needed to prioritize error prevention and recovery as a significant concern.
Having completed the problem exploration and user research phase, I felt equipped with ample data to make informed design decisions. To commence the sketching exercise, I conducted research on diverse methods and best practices, specifically focusing on accommodating a dense display of pricing information and flexible options during the creation of price lists.
Upon evaluating the current UI, which contained both settings and pricing data, I came to the realization that the optimal approach would be to separate the concerns of pricing and settings into two distinct views.
And, since I needed to incorporate a change log and version history, I opted for a tabbed navigation structure. This decision ensured that as pricing expanded to accommodate additional options, the UI would maintain flexibility and scalability over time.
Additionally, I realized that the most effective way to guide a user through pricing options would be to use UI logic conditionally display relevant views, questions or inputs based on previous answers.
By adopting a progressive disclosure approach, users would be able to concentrate solely on the questions that are relevant to them, enabling intuitive guidance throughout the process.
This approach would also enhance the user experience by incorporating helpful elements such as clearer calls to action, wayfinding improvements, and task completion status via stepped navigation element to and facilitate seamless completion of the a new price list.
In the final stage of my process, I aimed to ensure a path to success by proactively validating my assumptions through additional qualitative feedback from both internal stakeholders and actual users. This step enabled me to demonstrate the reasoning behind my design decisions and engage in a constructive dialogue to further enhance the workflows. These conversations also helped uncover common misconceptions about the UI's functionalities, leading to iterative improvements that addressed segments I had initially overlooked during the design phase.
Unfortunately, I am not aware of the business impact as had I left the company before the project went into production. However, prior to my departure, we had a kickoff meeting with the project manager and lead engineer to ensure a clear path to success and establish a release approach that would enable us to deliver value from the start.
Given the internal sentiment and investment into the redesign, I hold a high degree of confidence in the solution I presented because of the rigorous research and validation work that went into informing my final approach.
In a typical scenario, I would have chosen a continuous discovery approach for this project. This would involve measuring the impact of the redesign on our primary metrics, collecting additional user feedback through user interviews and surveys, and iterating on the design based on the insights gained.
By incorporating iterative user feedback and focusing on user-centricity, organizations can improve experiences, enhance customer satisfaction, and foster customer loyalty. This approach also enables organizations to stay competitive, adapt to market trends, and drive business growth.
