Research & Prototype
Our Goal: create a seamless buying experience in 7 months
We set out to energize the relationship between retail buyers and their wholesale suppliers.
Everyday, retail buyers plan, source, and purchase the products that you see on the shelves. The cumulative decisions of a single retail buyer can account for millions in annual revenue and directly affect the success of their company.
But before the products ever make it onto the shelves, buyers wade through a dizzying array of emails, spreadsheets, phone calls, and meetings to collaborate with wholesalers. This process is inefficient and frustrating for buyers across the board. Our goal was to simplify, clarify, track, and improve the way buyers and suppliers interact with each other.
Learning the industry
To understand how buyers interact with suppliers you have to talk their talk.
To prepare for interviews and contextual inquiries I facilitated team teach-back sessions to get up to speed on a jargon-heavy industry.
Next, our competitive analysis revealed a pattern: buyers rely on heavily-siloed systems. Our secondary research uncovered a succinct summary of why that might be the case: organizations tend to design software specific to their own needs and communication structures. This approach works well until retail and supplier companies struggle to work together because their software is so specific to their own processes that it doesn't play well with others. And to make matters worse, every retailer wants to work with their supply chain differently, making it hard to have standard and collaborative tools.
Uncovering the problems
To uncover why the buyer-seller relationship is so crucial to the buying process, I collected and analysed how buyers talk about their "best buy" to understand their motives (interestingly, every buyer has a "best buy" story ready to go at a moment’s notice).
Buyers stories abound from their working relationships with suppliers—some going back over 20 years. With little prompting, people were eager to talk about a great deal they negoriated, or a bet on a new trend paying off. These stories provided me with key insights, both into the motives for, and the process of, buying. To understand how products are negotiated I observed high-profile sales meetings during a contextual inquiry. To dissect what makes a great relationship, I asked everyone from managers to new hires about their closest inter-company partners.
I also encouraged experimental research activities to supplement the more traditional research methods. I designed an empathy-building activity that let our team experience first-hand the frustration and pressure buyers face while trying to stay on trend and hit sales meterics with incomplete information.
For more details about all of our research results, check out our full research report.
Finding the patterns
We modeled the relationships between, and the processes of, buying and selling and began to see where we could help connect people and simplify interactions.
Since we collected data from diverse users across the retail industry, we tracked several roles in an affinity diagram. We modeled the flow of information, organizational pressures, and personas, and we returned to these foundational models continually to uncover new insights.
Our models revealed that while retail and supplier organizations have many complex, feature-rich systems, the vital sales interactions fall into an abyss separating one company's system from another. We started to consider how we might create a buying experience that crosses company boundaries and brings buyers and suppliers together seamlessly.
Deeper Insights
Technology often prioritizes numbers, but more often it should emphasize and facilitate relationships.
Buying is based on a buyer's relationships: to their customers, to their suppliers. Where scale makes it difficult for these relationships to directly connect, technology can renew the connection.
To bring the buyer's relationships to the forefront of our designs, we wanted to make the buying experience more visual, collaborative, and fun. To capture the design direction, our team summarized our findings into four insights:
Buyers can’t find the needle in the haystack. Buyers need actionable information to make decisions, but they are given hand-me-down financial, sales, and product spreadsheets adapted from other department’s needs. When a buyer transitions roles, getting up to speed on all this product information can take months (especially when half the information is lost to the previous buyer’s email account).
Buyers struggle to put the puzzle together. Buyers gather insights from looking at competitors, observing their customers in-store, analysing sales data, and discussing trends with vendors. It takes a ton of effort to tease out actionable insights from these ad-hoc activities.
Purchase Orders are 20% work, and 80% headache. Buying means writing purchase orders, but emerging issues between buyers and vendors can cause late shipments, missed opportunities, and strained relationships.
What Happened to the Thrill? Buying creates a unique high that is part shopping, part strategic gambling, and part competition. Finding products and playing with data is the strategic core of buying—we want to get the mundane out of the way so buyers can focus on strategy.
The Concept Pivot
We pivoted from directly helping buyers to helping suppliers help buyers.
After the research phase, I led the team and our client through a series of branding and value proposition exercises to find the core values that connected our user's needs (demand) and our clients interest in developing our work into a business within a year (viability), and the 8 weeks we had remaining to create and test a full prototype (feasibility).
While trying to build consensus around a value proposition, I revisited one of our fundamental questions: why do buyers work with suppliers at all? The short answer: buyers have to review tens of thousands of products a year, so they rely on their suppliers to be partners, guides, and experts on the specifics of the products they sell. The best suppliers anticipate their buyers' needs to make their lives easier.
I started to conceptualize our prototype as a service platform. I realized we weren't in the best position to help buyers, suppliers were. Buyers already had a large network interested in supporting them. Rather than trying to design a tool for buyers, we envisioned a platform that allows them get more value from their existing supplier relationships.
Our Vision
To create a platform that connects and aligns everyone in the buying cycle, from retail department managers to sales reps.
To do this we created a platform that connects and aligns everyone in the sales cycle, from retail department managers to sales reps. We focused our prototype on the idea that buyers could "give a little and get a lot". Unlike other software in the market, we made it easy for buyers to organize and express their needs internally and externally to their supplier network. This structure makes the buying process visual, organized, and connected in real time. For a full breakdown of the features and benefits of our prototypes, check out our design report.
Read the report
My Prototyping Experience
Creating BuyingTime turned out to be a great example of how human-centered design could create business value.
I successfully ensured our client's interest in creating a business shaped and was shaped by our design process. By systemically aligning our research and designs to deliver value to both buyers and suppliers, we have created a novel service platform prototype that users are excited to try. And by thinking critically about the whole buying ecosystem, we have created a road map for how our client can grow prototype in the future.
"We don’t work that way right now… I think maybe we should. When can I try it?"
- Retail Buyer, 12 years
