Distributor Catalog

CASE STUDY

Distributor Catalog

Domain: Digital Commerce

Project Type: B2B

Platform: Web

To comply with the non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. The information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of my current organisation.

Project Brief

AppDirect platform allows any marketplace manager to manage all products within the marketplace catalog to ensure smooth running of their marketplace which meets customer needs.
One such crucial task is adding new or updated products/features to the marketplace, testing it in a staging catalog and publishing it to the production environment.
Currently adding products is limited to a manual process on the platform and does not allow customers to directly add any third party products from a distributor catalog.
The project was to address this gap and allow customers to seamlessly integrate products from any of their registered distributor accounts and provide a consistent experience of managing products on their marketplace.

Business Goal

Enhance product management capabilities for businesses by leveraging and building on top of already existing functionalities providing a more integrated experience ensuring better ROI for businesses and in turn for AppDirect and its vendors.

User Goal

Marketplace managers should be able to configure products across multiple sources (local catalog, network catalog, distributor catalog) with ease at one common place for their marketplace.

Project Team

Core Team - Product managers (2), Engineering (8-10) and UX (1).

In coordination with: Product managers across teams like Product Uploader, Checkout, Purchase, Storefront, Billing-Pricing and Purchase Fulfilment.

My Role

Individual contributor with complete ownership of all workflows, designs and explorations ensuring consistency and adherence to the design style guide.
Facilitate discussions to challenge product and engineering teams on decisions that may impact user journeys.

Define Scope

Initially, it was primarily getting into discussions with product managers across teams to define scope of work by understanding the existing platform capabilities and limitations. These discussions enabled me and the team to get a bird's eye view of the project and in deciding the areas to focus for quick wins.

Refine Scope

As the discussions evolved, my main task was to start iterating on designs for early feedback and also seek alignment from key stakeholders within the product, engineering and UX teams. These iterations helped in opening up new possibilities of functionalities that could be added either straight away or later. The 'must have' and 'good to have' features were explored/evaluated further.

Design and Future Scope

Considering it started out as an MVP, the key decisions were always around technical feasibility but as a designer my task was to showcase through iterations the possibilities that this product could have if and when we do address the limitations in near future.

Design Approach

Study of existing product management workflows - The current system of creating or adding products to a marketplace involves a lot of manual process, mainly creating or updating .csv files (containing product details) and uploading it using product uploader feature.
Once the upload is complete, product(s) go to the staging catalog which allows users to manage and test applications in a safe environment before they go live. This does not affect the live marketplace.
Product(s) published from the staging catalog go to the production catalog where marketplace managers can manage all live customer-facing applications.
This activity also involved study of product uploader, marketplace pricing, creating product editions, storefront, marketplace dashboard, etc.

Designs

As the team progressed with a high level understanding of requirements, low fidelity designs were created to align stakeholders. These were refined post multiple rounds of walk-throughs/demos.
These wireframes helped in widening and in some cases trimming down the scope which was not accounted for earlier. At this point the engineering team could start estimating the effort and resources needed from both back-end and front-end perspective but more importantly they would highlight timeline critical design changes suggested in the wireframe. Eg. Adding statuses for import, sync and publish within a same row on a table.
Although the wireframes didn't alter a lot from the initial workflow, user tasks and functionalities saw multiple updates.

1. Distributor widget on MP dashboard.

2. First time login to distributor account.

3. Distributor catalog listing.

4. Product selection for import.

5. Import & publish confirmation.

6. Listing of imported products.

Challenges: Design & Engineering

Placement of the NEW distributor catalog on the platform:

Where and how we place this new catalog was important to make it a seamless experience for end users. It was decided to place it on the dashboard for visibility and ease of access.

The platform already had a dedicated products sections for all related activities like adding, creating, editing, deleting and publishing.
Utilising this section seemed logical but technically challenging given the complex nature of codes been written for sections like left navigation which was on monolith, network catalog which was owned by the PFM (or purchase fulfilment) team and would need a substantial effort from their end to make updates to their code.
We did explore this with design though and engineering teams did analyse it but it was decided to stick to the dashboard approach for now.

Content mapping of newly imported products with the local marketplace products.
Filtering logic while importing products.
Distributor account logged out scenarios were not clearly identified.
Integration of pre-existing AppDirect network catalog with distributor catalog.

What Next?

The project is still active and the immediate agenda is to demo end-to-end capability to customers, advisors and vendors and get through the message of a truly integrated marketplace experience for marketplace managers and their businesses.
From a design point of view,
- Try to get access to end users for usability testing.
- Alternatively get feedback from end users and refine.
- Add newer functionalities: Creating product bundles, Add-on product functionalities, SSO integration.
- Start migrating designs to the newer Mantin Design System.