My Role
Head of Product Design
Product Designer
Facilitator
Context
From day 1, a big part of my role has been to collaborate with the B2B product family. This includes everything related to warehouses, fulfilment and the actual delivery, returns and overall user experience.
Challenge
When I joined, the first thing I encountered was a fragmented landscape with lots of legacy work, things being created by non-designers who were'n in the company anymore and overall a low level priority for user-centricity.
Setting up a strong suite of B2B Products to deliver a seamless shopping experience.
As Head of Design for the group, my role extends far beyond what end users see. A significant part of my work involves crafting great experiences not only for external users but also for the many individuals working tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure every purchase is seamlessly shipped. This includes often-overlooked user groups, such as: warehouse workers in Malaysia with limited English proficiency, brand managers sitting in Brazil and Indonesia looking to ship into Singapore, as well as various internal teams within the company (all with different levels of tech proficiency). It's very interesting work.
My team's goal (and subsequently my own goal) is to design solutions that empower every one of those users involved—from the sellers, to the warehouse, to our shoppers all the way to customer support. Only by looking at things with a service design lens (meaning, both backstage and front stage), can we really deliver solid holistic experiences.
As a first step, I decided to start by doing an onsite tour with my whole design team. I included B2C designers as well on purpose (I think this also helps the front of stage designers understand the complexity of what goes on behind the scenes).
We created a service blueprint of all the processes that happen from when a user places an order, and subsequently all the processes and teams that get involved to identify, pick, package and ship out the order.
We ran a UX audit of all the existing software to date. We found a ton of inconsistencies.
Our lead designer took the drive to build up a design system that took the best of each software, as well as idenitfy what could be a good candidate for deprecation. My role here was more on the backstage, supporting, providing guidance and direction as well as engaging the right stakeholders to get them onboard on the upcoming changes and effort needed.
A big item in our roadmap for 2023 was the rolling out of a new seller platform. While I can't share many details of the platform in itself, I can demo one of the final screens for product creation.
Work inlcuded the creation of a design language, logo, identity as well as the creation of new workflows from scratch as we were given the rare opportunity to think blue sky in terms of what a future, ideal process could look like for sellers.
Once the design system version one had been set up, the next step was to implement. Here's where the real work starts. We filled up a backlog with all the inconsistencies that needed to be ironed out, as well as the UI improvements that needed to be tackled and somehow always get deprioritised. We are still working through these now.
The lead designer for B2B drove the creation for the design system that took the best of each software, as well as identify what could be a good candidate for deprecation.
My role here was more on the backstage, supporting, providing guidance and direction as well as engaging the right stakeholders to get them onboard on the upcoming changes and effort needed.