Uncommon Goods

Research

I adopted a design thinking approach for this project to identify key problems our vendors were facing. We started by contacting our drop-ship vendors and support staff affected by last season’s shutdown.  I sent out a digital survey to all our vendors to determine their main pain points using the vendor extranet and figure out how they usually process orders. I also listened in on calls between vendors and our support team and conducted user interviews with our dropship support team to understand how they felt during the shutdown and how they worked through it.

Most of our drop-ship vendors were small shops selling personalized goods. Their workflow involved confirming order requests, uploading proof images for customer approval, and shipping the completed item to the customer.  Our vendors spent a lot of time working in excel spreadsheets, calling or emailing our support staff, and processing orders in the vendor extranet.

From these findings, I defined two primary personas for the project:

• The Dropship Vendor - A creator who works with us to sell their products through the Uncommon Goods website but fulfills and ships the orders themselves

• The Support Team Member - Helps vendors process their orders, answer questions, and provide everyday support

Design Process

We learned that vendors usually structured their workday in the context of a specific order life-cycle stage.  One day they would log in and just accept new orders; on another, they would create visual proofs; and on another day, they would be invoicing their completed orders. 

To structure the UI to accurately reflect a vendor’s order processing experience, I reorganized the order processing tables into four life-cycle status tabs.

• New - A newly created order which has to be approved or rejected by the vendor.

• Open - This stage is when the vendor sends the customer a visual proof of their personalized item for acceptance, and then the vendor creates the item.

• Shipped - The vendor packs and ships the order to the customer

• Complete - A new status that serves as an archive for all shipped and invoiced orders.

The existing UI was rendering every available column of information, even when it was unnecessary.  We drastically cut down on visual clutter by limiting information and interactions to only ones relevant to the order’s current status. This clean-up significantly reduced the time it took to find and process orders through a status.

We removed the table’s pagination and instead added a lazy load button that sequentially rendered 100 more orders to the table each time the user clicked it.  This change made is so the vendor could now see and interact with all their orders on one page instead of only seeing 25 orders at a time.

This table reorganization and new single-page structure made it easier to select multiple POs for bulk action, which helped move multiple orders through each lifecycle with speed and precision.

We conducted two rounds of user testing with our vendor support team to see how effectively they could process orders.  Our testers were already well versed with a personalized item’s order lifecycle and easily adapted to the new interface.  They really liked the new navigation. It provided an anchor to the experience and removed unnecessary order information in each table.

However, the real test would be when we rolled out the new UI to our Vendors during the holiday season.