Background

Sourcing is something we all do online now. When we have a desk job we often fumble through cabinets and ask the IT team for cables. Unfortunately employees find this to be more than an unpredictable experience for procuring products and services. Some employees make purchases regularly and the teams that support them need a seamless way to interface with them.

Our challenge?
Create a shopping experience that works for the enterprise but matches employees expectations.

The Process (EDM)

Understand

The learning plan
Understand the nuance of shopping in the enterprise

Research methods

User journey map:

• Track activities and the people behind them

• Understand their thought process

• Feel their pain

Competitive analysis:

• Internal review of Gartner “visionaries” report

• 13 organizations reviewed

• Key learnings as input to strategy and design direction

In-depth Interviews​

• Remote or in-person discussions to understand their current processes​

• 16 General Population (US, UK, Australia)​

• 19 ServiceNow​

• 14 KeyBank​

• 4 Pure Storage​

Our key questions:

• Who are the different types of shoppers and what are the challenges they have​?

• What is the enterprise shopping process today​?

• What are shopping behaviors and do they change based on requesting a good or service​?

• What is important to shoppers in a various contexts (i.e. mobile)?
  
  
  

What is it important for shoppers to do? (jobs to be done)

Learnings:

• There are a spectrum of shoppers (Average through advanced) with quite different needs

• The various shopper types range from very little to extensive knowledge and experience of the procurement process

• Purchasing for work is a highly transactional experience. Shoppers want in and out

• Surprisingly, there is a lesser desire for the ability to shop on mobile; more-so a desire to track status there
  
  
  
  

Detailed findings:

• Purchase processes and tools are complex and illogical

• Shoppers don’t have any visibility into the purchasing process once they submit a request

• Shoppers spend time clarifying their intent for a purchase

• Shoppers only know of issues when things don’t go as expected
  
  

Ideate

Market Scan - Consumer Shopping
We looked for external inspiration and to benchmark the landscape

Design principles
We defined design principals to support team alignment and aid in decision making

• Use plain english and friendly language

• Blur the lines between personal & professional

• Have meaningful transactions - Persona-based efficiency

• Provide a concise, clear, simple contextual experience
  
  

Early concepts​​
Divergent thinking that took into account a variety of mental models

“Provo”typing / Usability testing​​
Deliver prototypes to help narrow in on a solution

Prototype Evaluation

• Assess value we provide compared to their current experiences

• Determine if the prototypes are intuitive

• Participants:

  • 9 K19 attendees

  • 16 general population

  • 1 design partner
    
    

Scenario 1 / Desktop flow
Marketing professional (Average Shopper): Pretend you are a marketing events coordinator named Joe who has been tasked to work on a PowerPoint presentation for an upcoming event. You need help to create a polished presentation, so you decide to start by going to your company's employee portal.

Scenario 2 / Mobile flow (Advanced Shopper)
Pretend you are an IT inventory manager and receive a notification on your phone that lets you know the inventory in the Santa Clara stockroom is running low. An Auto Order has been created for you. You need to decide how you'd like to proceed with the order.

Scenario 3 / Mobile flow (Average Shopper)
Pretend you are a Field Service Agent who works for ACME Corp and you are at a customer's office, Cloud Vortex, to look into an issue they reported. You see that Cloud Vortex has a few different routers, and, due to a fan overheating, the routers need to be replaced with new fan kits. To respond to Cloud Vortex's case promptly, you decide to use your mobile phone to scan the barcode of the router so you can get a replacement kit for them. Go ahead and complete the order.

Summary of results
It is a huge improvement over what they currently use for several reasons:

• Transparency in the purchasing process, with recent order updates, clear timelines of what to expect and when, who to follow up with if necessary. This avoids the hassle of filtering through numerous emails which is what most currently do

• Easier to find multiple suppliers for a good/service because all the information is consolidated in one place

• Ability to quickly order previously purchased items/services, either through ‘Buy it Again’, ‘Saved’ or ‘Auto-order’. Many shoppers purchase the same items/services repeatedly and regularly, but have to recreate the orders every time with their current systems

• Ability to see their remaining budget. This helps them know how much they can afford to spend without hav ing to pull up reports, or track down someone who has the ability to pull that information

• Visually more appealing, and intuitive, because it feels like a consumer shopping experience and matches my expectations
  
  

Define

Changes during the design lifecycle need to be addressed

• Our VX guidelines had changed and needed to be incorporated

• We had to pivot from Employee Portal integration to launching as a standalone

Final designs​​

Implement

Development hand-off

• All designs delivered as Figma-based files

• Dev kick-off and follow-ups to ensure design consistency

Go live / 1st year customer base

• Have 5 live customers and ~45 in pipeline (includes GE Healthcare, Nascar)

• ~500K to 750K with ~12M-20M in pipeline

• 4 design partners

• 1 reference customer

Next steps / 3-year vision

• Implement and review metrics (unavailable before customers)

• Revisit mobile use cases

• Integrate fully within the Employee Portal product

• Build out a more robust fulfiller experience

• Better support shopper and fulfiller ESG (environmental, social and governance) needs

• Partner with Supplier Lifecycle Management and Accounts Payable and Legal team to support more broad workflows

• Update design principles to account for recent 3-year vision