ITEM LAUNCH FOR WALMART

Q1 2022

Walmart is the world’s largest company by revenue with about $570B in annual revenue. It is also the largest employer in the world with 2.2M employees. One of the company’s initiative is to build an omni tool for Merchants to evaluate & manage their inventory items, formulate business strategies then execute or launch these items.

The tool combines disconnected tools and ad-hoc processes into a single experience.

 

“The tool resulted in GMV and CP improvement (~$808K) on 7 items moved from MP to 1P channel.
Also, we are now able to ship faster building trust with our customers.”

— Specialty Pet Manager

  • Problem Statement

    Map out the user workflow for ordering items from the merchant’s inventory. Design the user experience and interaction for launching items.

    Duration: 3 months
    Users: Merchants (internal employees)

  • My Role

    Research assistance, sketch concepts, wireframing and prototyping.

    Team includes:
    2 User Researchers
    2 Product Designers

  • Outcome

    Established the data table interaction patterns to be adopted by the larger design organization as a whole. Ushered the product development from concept to MVP, while developing future state experiences. Identified use cases for future design considerations.

Process

Understanding the user & workflow

When the design team was engaged with the project, development was already underway. Our product and business partners have laid out their requirements and engineering was building to unlock these features. Design will have to catch up and apply the user experience layer on top of it. To understand the current user workflow, user interviews were conducted. The sessions were conducted by our researcher and the lead designer. Our goals? to understand the current process, identify user pain points and validate our initial workflow sketches.

To augment our user understanding and track our value adds, the design team also documents the customer journey.

Rough workflow to understand the scope of the tool

Research findings influence designs

The research highlighted that the processes are fragmented. The effort to collect all the information the user needs is enormous and individualized. Excel spreadsheet is the user’s tool of choice when planning their strategies.

It is at this point that the design team divided up the work. I will put together an end to end prototype (for the next research session) and design the ordering flow.

Sketch concepts for Ordering flow interaction

Usability and AB tests

With lots of collaboration and product requirement discussions, I created the ordering flow concepts. An end to end prototype was also created. The main goals for our next research session were to validate our workflow and also determine the correct interaction for our bulk actions. To get answers a combination usability and AB test was planned.

Concept candidates for testing

New discoveries and tiebreaker needed

This research session clearly revealed that there are 2 types of users and they perform different roles: forecasting and ordering. The wireframes needed to be adjusted accordingly. The cross functional team absorbed this information and the next iteration featured a distinct separation for both roles.

The AB testing results was not as conclusive. Users were split in half between the 2 concepts. To break the tie and arrive at a final design, designers ran the concepts through heuristic evaluation and submitted it for PURE (Practical Usability Rating by Experts) testing.



  • Lessons

    User research not only validated that we were doing things right but it also informed us of the right things to do. It proved that early research involvement is vital in formulating product strategies that targets user needs and meets business objectives.