3rdretail Africa is a B2B solution that connects brands, manufactures or distributors to resellers in a larger market space.
The formal solution helped the company do the basic day to day trade but was not fully flexible as customers (resellers) have to go through series of product to find what they are interested in, The brands also were not able to see which of the products that are performing well to focus more on, brands could not manage it's resellers list, and not to manually approve invoices over the phone.
We conducted a research on the existing application and got
feedbacks on pain points users experienced. With these, we were able
to identify the problem and tailor down solutions. The redesigned
application was tested cross users, adopting the unmoderated
usability study approach. This was done with the prototyped high
fidelity of the application and feedbacks were accessed to
understand the themes and patterns across these users grouping them
with the help of an affinity diagram after which we iterated. This
research was to figure out the following:
- To make it
flexible for brands to approve invoices,
- Brands
want to be able to see which products are performing best,
-
Brands want to manage its reseller base,
- Resellers
should be able to see products within their industry.
Roles,
responsibilities, and privileges of different categories of users
and Information to help during the wireframes, low-fi, and user
stories development.
The research phase equipped us
properly with the necessary information needed to produce
wireframes, low-fi mockups to get feedback very early in the design
phase. The insights, interviews, and solutions are included in this
study.
During the research stage, we were able to get the categories of users on the application. Their roles and privileges were also identified. This helped us profile the users appropriately based on their assigned duties.
Responsibilities
Invoice management
Manage resellers list
Responsibilities
View and manage pitched products
Cancel an order within a specified time
We were able to identify and address different concerns across the application user categories. This step not only gave the design phase a clear direction on how to implement design solutions, but also helped the development team to develop user stories.
These early-stage wireframes pointed the team in the right direction. We got early feedback by conducting a usability test on the wireframes. We used the information from the testing to develop user flows for different categories of users.
Some of the feedback we got from testing the wireframes were very useful to the team. I have highlighted some of them below.
I want to be able to see products that are related to my industry in the marketplace not all what i don't need.
I would love to see my best performing product on my dashboard
I want to be able to approve invoices easily.
The feedback helped us develop the user flow for various categories of users
The newly designed interface of the brands and resellers administration dashboards now have a much better visual experience for users to easily manage their products and see in realtime the best performing products they can pitch to the resellers.
As at the time of documenting this writeup, the re-design is in the deployment phase. All design iterations and improvement were done and handed over to the development team successfully.
Brands now have a more robust dashboard which has improved the way they manage their products and also able to see which products to pitch more to resellers based on performance.