ASSORTMENT EXECUTION WORKFLOW (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

  • Challenge

    How might we enable out users to execute on their assortment items within one platform?

    Key goal: Define the end to end user workflow for assortment execution (launching items).

    Duration: 3 months
    Users: Merchants (internal employees)

  • My Role

    I sketched concepts, created wireframe and prototypes and collaborated with the researcher to formulate the key scenarios to validate our assumptions. Additionally, we finalized an interaction model utilizing user behavior insights.

    Team includes:
    3 Product Designers
    1 UX Researcher

  • Outcome

    Discovered separation of roles and responsibilities (Merchants & Replen Managers).

    Identified separation of tasks and workflows (Forecasting & Ordering).

    Identified areas of user pain points or “black holes” in the user journey.

Process

Understanding the user & current 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.

From the initial user interview findings and product requirements, the designers mapped out a workflow. The workload was then divided between the designers, I took focused on the Ordering section and building the end to end prototype.

Designers collaborated and collected elements that would make up a complete workflow and divided up the design responsibilities.

Validating the workflow concepts

With basic understanding of the current user journey, I leveraged the product manager’s knowledge and requirement to create the Ordering workflow concept. I collected screens from all sections of the workflow and built a click-through prototype. After a few internal iterations, the next research sessioned was planned. Our goal was to validate the workflow and check the usability of the interaction concept. The base interaction model mimics the Excel spreadsheet input most users are currently doing.

User workflow

Ordering Workflow

Prototype thumbnails (for scope)

Key findings

This round of testing uncovered a major gap in the workflow – there are 2 distinct user types and separate roles and responsibilities. After a let down feeling, we understood that this is why we test and we are fortunate to find this out at this stage. The product manager and I got down to work on re-mapping the workflow and iterations of the concepts were built. Research findings strongly recommended a profile based access and a separate flow for Forecasting and Ordering.

The users were fine with the table input pattern Excel spreadsheet style.

The users expressed frustration on the lack of item tracking in their current journey which validated our initial hypothesis.

Revised workflow

Subsequent validation of the flow was conducted by the Product manager. An MVP versus future state designs was established to address development capacity issues. Profile based access was earmarked for the future state and designs were developed with that in mind. To address the lack of tracking, a basic summary metrics concept was developed while technical investigation into system notifications went underway.

Revised workflow

Before and After Designs

  • Lessons

    Multiple research sessions not only validated the workflow concepts, it also uncovered gaps and informed the final design. The key findings allowed us to identify what’s needed and adjust our approach accordingly.