Forecast Response
My Role
I was part of the pitch team and responsible for the experience and design of the Forecasts tools. In addition, I lead the UX work, producing all major deliverables and presenting these to the stakeholders. I worked and collaborated alongside the Product Owner, Business Development Management, Data Architect, and Front and Back-end developers.
The Ask from Stakeholder
The stakeholders came to the product and team requesting a way to increase the speed of transactions by 25% and sales by 15%. What I implemented first will be the discovery stage, as I am following the Double Diamond design approach.
User Interview
As I talked to several customer service and buyers, below are some pain points they are experiencing daily.
Lack of visibility on the materials they ordered.
There is no easy and quick way to see if their project is in danger or late.
There needs to be visibility on how many parts come into their warehouse and where they come from.
Switching accounts to see the status of their other projects is a big hassle.
I would like to see a snapshot/ summary of each project.
They want to see their materials' lead time to determine their order management.
A quick way to contact their sales rep/ customer service.
Another pain points
1. Providing the user a way to scan the tools, sort the information, and get the necessary data.
2. The user can connect with their sales rep and get all the data.
3. Data-heavy, complex information, and limited real estate.
4. An easier way to change Forecast information based on users' different bill-to accounts.
5. Restriction from legacy codes(Angular Components) and design system.
The Approach
My lack of platform knowledge meant I needed to understand the restrictions thoroughly and quickly. As a result, I am also working with the Business Development Management and Product Owner to understand users' needs better.
By collaborating with the Front and Back-end developers and the Data Architecture throughout the project, I finally understood the platform and the technical restrictions.
The following steps will be working with the buyers to get the right content and information on the platform.
Survey and Card Sorting Exercise
I conducted the survey and card sorting exercise to align with the buyers and customer service to determine what information was crucial for them; due to limited real estate on the platform, we needed to narrow it down to 10 categories.
The result from the survey and card sorting exercise:
Customer Part number.
Manufacture part number and name.
Inventory available to sell.
Qty multiple.
Item status (active/ inactive).
Lead time.
Pipeline next delivery Qty.
1st shortage date.
Weekly Forecast status.
Summary of each account.
Fixing The User Journey / Flow
After our brainstorming and whiteboarding exercise with the Product Manager. We decided to fix the user journey/ flow before working on the forecast platform.
The Old Flow
The user must go through these hidden steps on the old flow below. Unfortunately, if the user has multiple accounts, they don't have a way to see their account summary upfront and repeatedly go through the steps until they get the right one.
The New Flow
The New Design
The user will see their latest forecast data and can also select a different forecast/ account through the drop-down menu.
Another design solution that will ease and improve the user experience is introducing the color code on the forecast tools. This color feature will help the user glance through the forecast and be aware of the status of their forecast material.
Implemented the 10 categories that we decided on in our card sorting exercise.
Have a link for the buyer to email their sales rep/ customer service regarding their orders/ inventory.
We are summarizing their order/ project on the main menu.
Moment of Truth
After multiple iterations, we finally shipped this into production and soft-launched the feature to get some feedback from the users.
The feedback that we received from our Asian Pacific users is very positive, and they would love to get this as soon as possible. They like the color feature and the option to see their account summary upfront and not have to go through the old hideous steps—also, the speed of transactions has increased by 40% and sales by 20%.
