B2B Portal Redesign for Retailers

Role

Lead UX Designer

Discovery, Prototyping, User testing, UX design

Background

Specialized bikes wanted to revamp their existing B2b portal. Majority of the revenue for specialized comes from their retailers and wanted a create a new best-in-class digital experience for their future B2b website. The goal is to provide a system which can the dependency on account managers and provide visibility and self service capabilities.

The current portal has a lot of issues and had been last designed 10 years ago. Retailers using the portal were not able to effective manage orders, lacked visibility and were relying on account managers to manage business. I was the lead designer for this project and was involved in discovery & design. During the discovery I collaborated with Business, technology and retail partners.

The biggest challenge in this project was collaboration during the pandemic. To help us mitigate this issue I have used Miro for Visual Collaboration. Since we had people from all over US and few from Europe we needed a tool that can help us effective ideate, visually brainstorm & illustrate ideas.

Process

Understanding the customers and their needs

To empower the customer and build a best-in-class digital experience we needed to understand our customer, their daily routines, their needs and goals. To understand the customer needs and pain-points we started with them answering a questionnaire and spoke to them to understand their day to day business activities and other systems they interact with and their problems with the current portal.

After gathering this information I created high level personas and mapped their needs and pain-points.

Brainstorming Ideas ("How Might we Solve")

After understanding the users and their needs I mapped the journey of the customers and identified opportunities/ideas. I collaborated with business and technology teams to ideate and see how might we solve some of the pain-points. Involving multiple people from multiple discipline helped us with various perspectives and also do an impact vs feasibility mapping and prioritize ideas.

Revised Flow

Based on the previous phase I came up with the revised Flow for the portal.

Low fidelity to High fidelity prototypes

Ideas and concepts were wire-framed and validated with users. This process was iterative until we were confident that the users were able to accomplish their goals and met the success criteria. Designer were delivered in Figma and shared with dev teams.

Results & Takeaways

The designs were received well and we got amazing feedback from the B2b users and they felt that a lot of email and phone conversations will be reduced once this portal is launched and they were really happy that they could play a big role in shaping the B2b experience.

Understanding the customer journey helped us identify opportunities to better service the customers in way that most mattered to them. With the help of Miro we were able to collaborate effectively even when the teams were distributed and all the sessions were virtual. Adopting the right tools and embracing creativity/perspectives is the key successful collaboration.