OVERVIEW
Role
Lead UI designer partnered with a UX architect on this project. I participated in research and design, as well as advising on best design practices.
Team
2 Designers
1 Product Manager
10 Developers
Timeline
Design and testing - 6 weeks
Development - 4 sprints with a 2/21 release
Tools
Sketch
InVision
Notion
OPPORTUNITY
Vendors found our legacy design cumbersome, so they avoided it.
The existing Turns & Rehabs portal was a legacy design that hadn’t undergone any part of the human-centered design process. Vendors felt it was a waste of time to use. Which created extra work for the Vendor Managers, who had to use the vendor’s portal for them.
OUTCOME
Improved UX led to 25% improvement in vendor retention, saving $400k ; total time saved & improvements saved SMS over $1.2M per year.
We created a refreshed vendor portal that allows our Turns & Rehabs vendors to easily accomplish their goals. With less frustrations, vendors can spend less time in the portal and more time working with us and for our clients. In addition, internal SMSers in vendor management can focus on their job duties, not the vendors’. Once released, we expect a 75% decrease in vendors managers fielding inquiries (since the information is now easy to find in the portal).
UNDERSTANDING VENDOR MOTIVATIONS
Why were they avoiding using the Vendor Portal?
The design team conducted user interview sessions with vendors of varying sizes and trades located across the country. Our main goals were to uncover:
Why were vendors using our portal? What was the most important reason they went in there?
Did different roles at their company access different areas of the portal?
What parts of the portal went untouched, vs. pages with high traffic?
While a few of our vendors had their owner acting as a jack-of-all-trades, we discovered that the majority of vendors had an office manager who handled portal-related duties. We used their experience to inform a vendor persona and discovered that the main reason vendors went into our portal was to track payment on their projects.
REDESIGNING THE VENDOR PORTAL
Through our user research, we narrowed down the specific areas of the portal that caused the most trouble for vendors. My fellow designer and i wireframed the initial redesigns of these pages.
Wireframe
Problem
The main dashboard was not geared towards Turns & Rehabs vendors, featuring empty stats with no clear direction on where to go and what to do. Jobs to be done were under different tabs with vague titles.
Problem
Project and work order pages were legacy design - outdated and cluttered with irrelevant form fields. There were extra form fields that took up space and didn’t reflect the true status of the project. These pages didn’t focus on what vendors cared about most: payments.
A dashboard with sections to accept projects and change orders, and view all in-progress and closed projects.
Wireframe
A project page with payment progress at the top. Line items are divided by bundle, with statuses for each. For accounting-savvy users, there are links to separate finance pages that break down check information.
HI-FIDELITY SOLUTION
With the help of the UX team we turned the wireframes into hi-fidelity designs. We tested with users over 2 rounds to ensure the core requirements of the wireframes translated.
