Supplier Portal UX Improvements

Introduction

To improve Tungsten Network's supplier portal experience and become a more customer-led organisation an initiative was created to implement design thinking processes into the business. My role was to help lead the customer research and facilitation of design thinking workshops. These workshops were used to understand our customers better to deliver creative solutions and help solve common pain points. After each key project milestone, I would provide updates to c-suite executives and heads of departments.

Customer research

For the first phase, we interviewed 35 customers to understand our customer's jobs to be done, where they are struggling and what success looks like to them. We then collaboratively defined our personas, collected interview quotes, and sorted them into key topics.

Ideation

Based on customer feedback and business goals the team decided to focus on improving the invoice status journey and experience. This part of the supplier journey provides the most value to suppliers as it is critical for them to get paid on time and improve business cash flow. During this phase, we mapped out the current journey and highlighted where we could improve and reduce the steps. We also looked at other experiences we thought were "best in class" to help with the brainstorming session. Collaboratively we mapped out the screens and designed an experience that we thought would be the best experience for our customers.

Protyping & User Testing

Interactive high fidelity protoypes were created for user testing and feedback. Using hotjar, I ran a survey on the portal asking the users to view the new status page prototype with open ended questions to get there feelings and detailed unbiased feedback. This helped us get customer perspective of the design using a low-cost prototype requiring no development. Quickly identify if we are going in the right direction and iterating based on feedback.

 

 

Iteration

After synthesizing the results I looped back customer feedback to stakeholders, sharing suggested improvements and next steps in the design process:

• Adding a paid status would be useful
• The ability to view multiple invoices, one by one is extremely time consuming
• Livechat to challenge or understand exceptions would be a good thing