Redefining how our buyers discover and shop on JOOR
Background
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, there became a huge demand in the retail wholesale industry to switch to digital platforms such as JOOR to help brands and retailers do business with each other. A majority of the JOOR business structure at the time was to facilitate orders between brands and retailers with existing relationships. We had only started figuring out how to help retailers discover and do business with new brands with the pandemic hit but immediately had to increase our efforts as an influx of interest came in.
Initial asks
There were two separate initial asks that were given to me and the two product managers for these projects. The first project was to create a marketplace on our platform for retailers to discover and shop new brands. The second project was to enhance the current brand profile page so our brands can showcase their brand identity and business to prospective retailers.
These two projects were initially separate asks, one coming in from the VP of Product and the other coming in from Sales. I quickly realized both had the same end goal which is to help our brands promote themselves to prospective retailers to increase sales and for retailers to truly explore brands on our platform and create meaningful business relationships. In this realization, I quickly brought the two product managers together to discuss and brainstorm these projects as two parts of one larger project.
A big challenge of this project was that there was a lot of pressure to release something quickly to show the industry that we were innovating. We had one quarter to release an MVP for brand profile and two quarters to release an MVP for Marketplace.
My role(s)
I served as a subject matter expert, led brainstorming and strategy discussions with product directors and product managers to figure out our end vision and how this project impacts the rest of the platform, led the UX experience and worked with product managers to figure out phases of implementation. Since I had the most experience working on projects across the platform, I also guided the project processes.
Team(s)
- 1 product manager managing the marketplace project with eng pod of 5
- 1 product manager managing the brand profile project with eng pod of 6
- 1 mid-level designer who worked with me to execute phase 1 of marketplace and brand profile
Assessment of the current platform
The first thing the product managers and I had to do was to assess our platform and find gaps and areas of impact if we were to introduce a marketplace. Our current platform was designed specifically for brands and retailers with already existing business relationships. We had some existing features to help both sides increase engagement with each other, however they were not successful in fulfilling our users’ needs. For our brands, we had an existing brand profile page for brands to add their business info and promote themselves. However, the profile did not give enough flexibility in showcasing our brands’ identity, was hard to use because it was designed in a form format and the actual profile creation was separate from the actual profile page and it did not provide the necessary content tools for users to create a customizable and engaging experience for their different customer groups.
For our retailers, we had an existing brand directory page but it was painfully hard for our retailers to discover new brands because there was no intuitive way for retailers to filter or search for brands or products that would fit the criteria they buy for nor did we have any personalization AI built to recommend the right content to our retailers. Retailers had to look through pages of brand profile thumbnails not knowing which brands sell what they were looking for or even if their brand aesthetic matched the retailer's without clicking into the brand profile.
As I talked with users and did some research into some e-commerce marketplaces, I also realized discovering new brands and products is closely tied to shopping and should not be two separate experiences. We needed to revisit how our brands and retailers currently buy and sell on our platform and re-evaluate how we can have a more seamless discovery to buying experience.
Current platform - the brand directory and brand profile a retail user would see
Current platform - how a brand user would need to edit their brand profile
Areas of impact
So the main problem we were trying to tackle was to be able to give our retailers an easy and intuitive way to discover new brands while shopping. This one problem actually touched upon a lot of other issues we needed to address on our platform as well. Here's the list:
- Our retail users complain out how segregated the platform is. There are 3 types of selling presentations a retail user can receive, each with their own separate flow and area on the platform. Discovering brands is also a separate area on the platform as well.
- Our brand profile does not give enough flexibility to showcase our brand's identity and it is hard for a brand user to create.
- In order to have a marketplace that is personalized based on a buyer's patterns and behaviors, we need to introduce user level accounts within the retail/brand account. Establishing user level accounts will also let us re-design our messaging system to be directed at the user level rather than account level.
- We knew that the release of Marketplace will cause strain on the lite retailer buying process so this was something we also had to figure out how to fix.
For the first phase of this project, it was not feasible to solve all these issues. We had lots of discussions with the entire product team to figure out which additional items we would need to tackle now so that it would not block us and when we could tackle the others.
Vision
After much brainstorming between the product managers and I, we envisioned a much more streamlined discovery and shopping experience with marketplace as the central location. Retailers would be able to discover and buy from our brands through personalization per user account, recommendations based on machine learning and robust search and filtering for retailers to find as broad or as specific of a term as they need. The brand profile would also in turn change to brand stores in marketplace that would give brands the flexibility to customize their stores however they need to attract, promote and sell to retailers.
Goals and Planning
Marketplace
We knew we needed to phase out this project because there were a lot of dependencies on where we needed the rest of our platform to be in order to get to our end vision and we also did not have enough resources at hand. The plan was to break the project up into 2 phases: phase 1 - being able to discover in marketplace, phase 2 being able to discover and shop in marketplace.
Based on the feedback we got over the years and the interviews we conducted, we determined the user goals we needed to tackle first were to:
- Create an intuitive experience using robust searching and browsing functionalities to support the different ways our users discover. We know generally our enterprise and luxury retail buyers want to discover by knowing more about the brand identity and aesthetics first while our smaller retailers and contemporary retail buyers might discover by brand identity and aesthetics first or by products first if they need to immediately fill in some products to complete their season's buys.
- Create a solid foundation for marketplace so we can seamlessly build in shopping in the future. From our research, we know that there is not always a clear distinction between shopping and discovery, at times can be intertwined in the buying process. We have heard from our users that they have been confused by all the different ways to shop on our platform. We saw this as an opportunity to build a central area for a combined experience so our users wouldn't have to learn to use so many different experiences for buying (and discovery which flows into the buying process).
- Create personalization and recommendations. Our retail user base has quite a wide range of buyer types. We have luxury buyers who might buy for very specific niche products while our contemporary boutique buyers might buy for multiple departments and product categories. We also know buyers have very tight deadlines and hate having their time wasted. So in order for our marketplace to be effective, it needs to be smart and only show and recommend them brands and products that are within the categories, aesthetics and price ranges they buy for.
The user goals we want to tackle in Phase 2 are to:
- Enhance personalization and recommendations and add in curation. Once we have user level accounts established, we will be able to truly enhance personalizing the marketplace for our users. We also know that buyers are constantly trying to get ahead of trends so it's important for our marketplace to be constantly relevant.
- Add in shopping capabilities. Our ultimate goal is for retailers to turn their brand discoveries into buys for their stores so it's crucial that we have shopping capabilities seamlessly included into marketplace.
Brand Profile
Also because of limited resources and dependencies on improving other parts of the platform, we had to phase this project out. Our plan for the brand profile was to phase it in four parts: phase 1 - improve current profile creation experience, phase 2 - add ability to support multiple pages, phase 3 - support multiple projects and visibility permissions, phase 4 - integrate shopping into the brand profile and turn it into a digital store experience.
The user goals we wanted to tackle here were to:
- Create a user-friendly profile creation experience so our brand users who have no design experience can easily create beautiful profile to promote their brand to retailers.
- Give our brand users the flexibility to create different profile experiences to promote their various departments and customer groups. We realize one profile page is not enough to help our brands promote themselves because they might have multiple product departments they're selling, different tradeshows they're selling in and various customer groups they curate the selling experience for.
- Create an integrated marketing and selling creation area for our brand users so they can easily connect all their creations into a seamless selling experience. Just like how our retailer buying experiences are all segregated, so are our selling tools. We saw this as an opportunity to evolve our brand profile into a digital store experience where our brands can choose the audience they need to cater to.
Phase 1 - Design Phase
For both the marketplace and brand profile projects, I led design process and directed the user experience with one designer working with me. I started both of these projects first thinking and structuring the end vision and then working backwards to the first phase we want to tackle.
Marketplace - Notes and Wireframes
For marketplace, I did a lot of secondary research into b2c marketplace sites like Amazon, Etsy, Alibaba and b2b wholesale sites like Faire and LA Showroom to compare how they structure their sites, the content they put on their pages, how their search functionality works and how they organize their browsing structure.
I also needed to figure out the different user experiences we had to support for our account types and user groups. I needed to think about what the public, logged out, logged in lite (free) retailer, logged in pro retailer marketplace experiences would be as well as how marketplace would or would not help our user groups with their needs.
From there, I got a better understanding of how we can lay out our marketplace experience and began wireframing the ideal vision and then cutting it down to the phase 1 version. This entire process took over a month's worth of time to think through as well as multiple meetings with the PMs every week to review and brainstorm my ideas. Once I had a rough idea of phase 1, the other designer working with me designed the hi-fi mocks and polished the interface. You can see a bit of my notes and wireframes in the slideshow below.
Brand Profile - Notes and Wireframes
Since phase 1 was to improve the existing brand profile and the requirements were more or less defined, I tasked the other designer to lead the phase 1 designs while I focused on designing the future experience of brand profile and how it would fit into marketplace. I spent a lot of time reviewing gaps in the user experiences on our platform, thinking through the user journey from marketplace to profile and creating visual aids to help me pitch my ideas to PMs and other internal stakeholders. You can see some of my visual aids below. Once we were in agreement on the future experience of brand profile, I spent the rest of my time on this project reviewing designs and providing design direction when needed. We based the experience of the profile creation tool on a lot of website builder tools currently out in the market, like SquareSpace, Wix, Format. These are experiences users on the web are generally familiar with and these companies have already spent the time designing and researching patterns to use for their products. With the limited time and resources we had, we knew we would might not be able to have proper user testing before the build which is why relied heavily on our secondary research.
Phase 1 Final Designs and Results
We recently released the alpha version of our brand profile for some of our brands to start testing so we're still waiting for feedback to come in as we are making adjustments. Some brands have already started making profiles; I have some examples below.
Marketplace phase 1 is still being built and will not be released until later this year. We've gotten user feedback on the mocks and our future vision so far and the consensus been very positive and users are excited to start using it.