Distributors Buyout
Marketplace
Duration
8 Weeks
Toolset
Miro, Sketch, Abstract, Invision, Craft
Platform
Web
Team Size
14 Members
I worked as a product designer to plan, prioritize, coordinate, and conduct the end-to-end design process, and was also responsible for development hand-off.
The product vision is to transform the metals industry with cloud-based, AI-driven e-commerce and marketplace solutions, enabling digital transformation.
It streamlines operations for metals distributors, service centers, mills, and traders by simplifying product sourcing, managing overstock, and removing friction in buying and selling metals.
The Problems 🚨
Undercut by a competitor
Distributors have situations, when the items requested by their customers are either not available in stock or not carried by them at all.
Limited circle of contacts
Currently, the distributors reach out to their limited circle of contacts at other distributors or suppliers, to try and find someone who can fill the buyout requirement at the earliest.
Challenges 🧗🏻
Using secondary research
Since we weren’t interviewing the actual platform users, we addressed this uncertainty by planning a user forum to test and validate the solution once the product wireframes were ready.
Collaborating across four time zones
With stakeholders spread across three time zones, we leveraged collaboration tools like Miro and InVision to review concepts and designs and gather feedback efficiently.
Stakeholder Interviews 🗣️
Conducted stakeholder interviews and domain discussions to align on product vision, user needs, and solution visualization.
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Interviewed 3 stakeholders to understand product vision, value proposition, competition, and user problems.
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Discussed domain, industry workflows, standards, and business processes to quickly visualize solutions.
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Leveraged stakeholders' knowledge and experience in the industry.
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Requested industry-standard samples to implement in the platform.
Analyzing Competitors 🤼♂️
Conducted competitor analysis and domain research to propose and validate new features, aligning them with user needs and business goals.
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Identified and validated 4 secondary and tertiary competitors for analysis.
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Analyzed additional domain-specific parameters like shipping approach, number of products, and product types.
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Based on the analysis, new features were suggested to address user problems.
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Features were added to the scope after detailed business discussions.
Mind Mapping ✍🏻
The mind map covered all requirements analyzed and ideas around the product shared by stakeholders.
In addition to that, we also covered a few additional features that came out in the competitive analysis which would help users to streamline their business processes.
Personas 🧑🧑🧒🧒
We defined five personas for individual and corporate account types based on stakeholder input, refining them in later phases.
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Persona shortlisting was done in the discovery phase to inform the design of interfaces.
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Each persona included details on background, goals, reasons for selecting the product, tech savviness, daily tasks, and frustrations. We used the collaboration tool "Miro" to present these personas to stakeholders and gather feedback.
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Through the persona development process, we uncovered additional user tasks, frustrations, and goals not initially documented.
User Goals 🎯
To make sure we understand the user well and what they are trying to achieve using this platform, we defined user goals and categorized them into 3 types: Life goals, End goals, and Experience goals.
Life goals: Whom the users want to be
End goals: What the user wants to do
Experience goals: How the user wants to feel
User Interactions 👆
The goal was clear: ensure users could interact with the system to complete tasks efficiently. We used the following techniques to achieve this:
User Flows
User flows helped us stay focused on user needs, providing a clear overview and enabling the creation of a seamless user experience.
Task Flows
Task flows streamlined interactions, making them minimal and meaningful. Stakeholder validation provided valuable insights into the users' mindset during task completion.
Information Architecture
Information architecture was developed to organize and label the data collected during the secondary research and analysis phases.
Wireframe and Prototype 🛠️
Given the complexity of the product with long workflows, we created a clickable wireframe prototype to define interactions and simplify user testing in the forum. After testing, users provided positive feedback on the platform and its features, with suggestions for process and workflow improvements, which were incorporated in the next iteration.
Style-guide & UI Library 📖
The development handoff is a crucial step, as it ensures the final product aligns with the design vision. To facilitate this, we created a comprehensive style guide and UI library for the developers, covering typography, colors, elevation, buttons, tabs, form elements, icons, and other UI components used in the designs. This helped ensure consistency and smooth collaboration during the development process.
The Solution 💡
After refining based on user feedback, we began designing the final screens in Sketch, using the style guide and UI library as a foundation. We adopted a fresh corporate visual style to appeal to the personas, who are familiar with such products. Following Material Design guidelines, we ensured a cohesive and intuitive design throughout the product.
Outcomes & Lessons 🏆
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Working with people who have served more than 2 decades in this domain was challenging but a great experience, so we documented all discussions that happened with stakeholders and it worked really well to understand the product and domain.
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The user forum went really well and gave us really good insights into the usability and user flows we designed for the platform. We do not always get a chance to interact with end-users but at least planning such user forums helps to validate the designs.
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In remote work situations, collaborating on platforms like Miro and Invision was very crucial and added great value to the design process we followed.
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And finally, we delivered the designs on time also accommodating the iteration we did after the user forum.