Spreetail Dashboard widget

Introducing a new feature to help small to large business owners resolve Amazon sales issues using Spreetail’s Partner Portal.

Overview

Spreetail is an e-commerce company that assists vendors in selling, marketing, and expanding their businesses across multiple marketplaces. Their Partner Portal enables vendors to access essential metrics, notifications, and sales data.

Collaborating closely with a fellow UX Designer and Product Manager, my main objective was to integrate a new suppression widget and feature into their Partner Portal.

Roles

UX Designer, UX Researcher

Timeline

May 2022 - July 2022

Deliverables

Journey Maps, Sketches & Wireframes, Prototypes

The Challenge

Spreetail's vendor managers frequently sent out emails and scheduled additional weekly meetings to keep their vendors updated on suppression issues hindering their sales. Vendors were eager to address these suppressions but lacked the resources to resolve the problems independently, without their vendor manager's assistance.

The Problem Statement

There was an opportunity to provide consistent visibility and actionable insights related to suppression within the Partner Portal to decrease the overall number of suppressed SKUs.

Assumptions

Due to time constraints, we wanted to move quickly on this project. To lay a strong foundation for our first designs, I wanted to understand all of my assumptions.

  • Vendors want to feel empowered with actionable insights.

  • Suppression is important to our vendors.

  • Vendors want to see suppression on the dashboard.

  • Most vendors will have a limited understanding of suppression.

  • Vendors want to see the most important data points first.

 Internal Validation

The business suggested a dashboard widget to prompt users to contact their Vendor Manager. However, we opted for a more actionable design based on my assumptions to help users understand suppression. I presented two journey maps during a stakeholder check-in to demonstrate how our suggested journey would empower vendors.

Business Recommendation

 

UX/Product Recommendation

Sketches & Wireframes

Once we had stakeholder approval to pursue the product team’s suggested journey map, I began to ideate concepts. Through a crazy 8s and lightning demo sketch session, I was able to develop an initial workflow for the feature.

Once the initial concept was decided, I began to wireframe to set the foundation.

Initial Mocks 

 

Dashboard Widget

The widget gives high-level insights on the dashboard so vendors can understand how suppression is impacting their sales.

 

The table lists all of the suppressed SKUs and provides more information on why the SKU is suppressed. To resolve the suppression, vendors can open a resolution modal. Once an action is confirmed, they can check the status of the SKU by looking at the Pending Resolution Modal.

Suppression Feature

 

To resolve the suppression, vendors can review the options listed in the Resolution Modal. Once an action is confirmed, they can check the status of the SKU by looking at the Pending Resolution Modal.

Resolution Modal

Pending Resolution

Concept Validation & Usability Testing

Using the initial mocks I created, the product team and I conducted 5 usability tests to gather insights on our new feature.

Key Insights

To better identify key insights and themes from our research, I analyzed the data using an affinity map. Overall the vendors really enjoyed the feature and it garnered an average ranking of 6/7 for its importance.

1. Vendors had a limited understanding of suppression and how to fix the issue. To add clarification, three changes were made:

  • Clarified the names of the suppression types,

  • Added a suppression defintion, and

  • Used tooltips to clarify table headings.

2. Vendors pointed out to us that we were not providing the right information in the resolution modals. To rectify this, I made the following enhancements:

  • Included a link so vendors can view the competitor’s listing,

  • Updated the solutions that vendors can select to better suit their needs, and

  • Increased the time that the SKU could be pending from 24 hours to an indefinite timeline that gives vendors flexibility.

Final Prototype

After a feasibility check with our developers, I was able to finalize our prototype for the dev team.

Outcomes

We saw a 12% decrease in vendor manager calls related to suppression. To continue expanding on this feature, more research would need to be done with vendors to see how it meets their needs in practice.

Lessons Learned

During this project, I was able to develop my data visualization skills when I was designing the widget. We wanted to add a lot of key data to give vendors insight into the suppression feature before drilling down deeper. To structure the information well, I used color and fonts to convey the importance of the different information.