Wayfair Inbound Order Management
Rebuild the Inbound Order Management tool in the Wayfair CastleGate logistic service. This tool allows suppliers to track shipments from factories to warehouses.
Company
Wayfair
Role
Lead Product Designer
Duration
1 year
Team
Kayane Kassabian - Lead PM
Harris Berton - Sr. Lead PM
Neha Abrol - Sr. Engineer Manager
Matthew Gray - Frontend Engineer Manager
Vadym Skorba - Frontend Engineer Manager
Salah Abdul Salam - Backend Engineer Manager
Overview
CastleGate is Wayfair's logistic service, and it helps Wayfair suppliers transport large furnitures from the factories, which usually reside in Asia, to the Wayfair or private warehouses in United States and Europe.
The Inbound Order Management (IBOM) is a self-serve tool at the center of the CastleGate business. After putting down inbound orders, suppliers use IBOM to track these orders and get insights of their availability to become sellable.
proposal
The most recent update of IBOM was launched in July 2022, inherting technical and UX debt from existing codebases. The team has witnessed several issues from it.
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Poor user experience
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Unscalable design and codebase
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Inconsist design system
To give users a better visibility of their inbound orders in a timely manner, and improve the scalabitliy of the design and codebase, the team decided to rebuild the whole inbound order management experience.
Research
Inbound Order Management is an extremely complicated space. It has the most stakeholders and back-stage actions in the logistic process. To truly understand this space and user pain points, the reseach was conducted in various ways.
IBOM connects the digital online service "Partner Home" with the offline logistic operation and show relevant information to suppliers for decision-making.
After a month of secondary research and consulting industry experts, I created a IBOM service blueprint to illustrate these complicated relationships and align everyone on the current IBOM business modal.
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Analysis
From the user research, we concluded three main logistic roles that are using IBOM.
And we summarized the high-level goals these users want to accomplish in IBOM,
...as well as the pain points in the current IBOM when users are conducting these tasks.
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confusing IA
The inbound business modal is not presented correctly. It's confusing and hard to navigate.
poor edit experience
The editing experience is inconvenient, insecure, and buggy.
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limited findability
Users can only search by limited data points, and it makes finding orders difficult.
data inconsistency
The data is inconsistent among the IBOM website, CSV files, and email notifications.
unclear UI feedback
The feedback given to users is unclear when things are not working.
Bugs
Users reported bugs throughout their inbound experience.
We put everything together and created a user journey that illustrate each step that users go through, their goals, feelings, pain points, and opportunities.
Ideation
With the learnings and analysis from research, I facilitated multiple brainstorming session with peer designers, PMs, and engineers to find the best solutions and prioritize each initiative.
The team aligned on the main features we want to focus on in the redesign, and planned two cycles (1 year) with multiple launches to include all the features.
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Increased visibility
New information architecture better reflects the business model and makes it easier to navigate.
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Edit mode
Edit mode allows users to edit information directly and is error-proofing.
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improved findability
Users can search and filter by 8 more data points, making it easier to find both orders and shipments.
scalable design
The modularity in design allows the design to grow organically as the business evolves.
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Coherent UI feedback
Every empty state and error will have accurate and coherent explanation and next steps.
updated design system
The new UI will use the latest Homebase design system that reflects Wayfair branding and is consistent with other pages.
Prototype
The most important and fundamental change to IBOM is the information architecture. The new structure of IBOM needs to accurately reflect everything in the current business modal, account for future business development, and be user-friendly.
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Because of the scale of information and granularity, we established a basic list view / detail view structure for IBOM.
The list view combined all the tabs in the legacy design and turned them into attributes, making it much easier to navigate and search.
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The detail view contains two levels of information:
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Order
It's users' (suppliers') intention of transporting items from factories to warehouses.
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Shipment
It's Wayfair CastleGate's excution of the actual transportation, consisting of one or more containers.
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On each level, there is detailed information that can be grouped as timeline, details, and items.
I explored multiple different layouts to better reflect this structure and make it understandable and easy to navigate.
User testing
I explored multiple different layouts to better reflect this structure and make it understandable and easy to navigate. They all demonstrate the two-level structure of order and shipment, and each level contain seperated timeline, details, and items.
I grouped them into three different options and conducted A/B testing with 12 users with diverse demographics.
10/12 participants preferred option 2 and showed better grasp of the structure with it. But 9 participants also expressed preference towards the details section in option 1. After discussing with the team, we decided to comebine option 1 and 2.
Design Iterations
After aligning on the basic information architecture of the new design, I started working on the North Star solution of the new IBOM. We call it Manage Inbound Orders (MIBO).
Based on the North Star, our team split the whole project into 15 features. For each feature, I'm going through the following design process.
01
Identify the problem & research
I will identify the problem space of the initiative together with the PM and collect relevant information and research results.
02
Brainstorm with the product team
I will facilitate a brainstorm session with all the PMs and Front-end Engs to sketch ideas together. Through these sessions, I can see the problems from business and techinical angles and better understand the restraints in ahead.
03
prototype & jam
I will synthesize the research results and brainstorming ideas and create mid-fi prototype with Wayfair design system components. Sometimes, I will jam with other designers at this stage.
04
design review with designers
I will go to the weekly designer review sessions to get feedback on the user experience and align on customized components.
05
design review with stakeholders
I will go to the bi-weekly stakeholder alignment meetings to get feedback from stakeholders.
06
final review with the product team
The final review is done with the product team again to make sure that the design not only achieves our business goals but is also feasible and user friendly.
Build
While I'm going through design iterations, the engineering team is also working on completed designs simultaneously. The design handoff process is quick but comprehensive. I collaborate closely with engineering team to ensure successful design implementation.
01
Design demo
I will walk through the complete behaviour of each feature with engineers and highlight custom components and interactions.
02
pairing with engineers
I will have quick pairing sessions with engineers when they are building the feature. We will discuss technical restraints and find solutions together.
03
QA
We will perform QAs on all the features built in a cycle at once. Engineers and I will test each feature in the dev environment and record feedback in a spreadsheet. If there is any major issue, we will review it again in the next cycle.
Business impact
MIBO was launched in June 2024. Within a month, we are already seeing a drastic increase in efficiency. The average time taken to compelete the main 5 Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) went from 11 minutes to 5 minutes.
​In a post-launch survey with 364 responses, the satisfaction score of the newly launched product was 4.6 out of 5. Users expressed strong enthusiasm and appreciate of MIBO.