Not On The High Street (NOTHS), is a prominent e-commerce marketplace connecting curated partners with customers seeking unique, often personalized products.
Role:
Lead Product Designer
Industry:
E-Commerce
Duration:
3 months
Challenges
The B2B platform made for the partners to manage their side of the marketplace grew with complexity over the years but had little design resource.
This project was part of an initiative to revitalise the platform to improve relationships, enhance efficiency, and support business growth. The first part of the journey — Product upload, was chosen as a starting point to work on.
Why we chose this to journey:
First Journey: It’s often the first experience for new partners, making it crucial to create a positive first impression.
Simplification: Consolidating and simplifying steps into one form to streamline the process.
Efficiency: Improving and speeding up the product addition process, reducing partners' time and effort.
Technical Understanding: Gaining insights into the platform's technical background to ensure feasible solutions.
Support Reduction: Reducing the need for support and approval communications by making the process more intuitive.
My Approach
Discovery Phase
Our initial hypothesis was that updating the UI and simplifying the product approval steps would allow partners to get products live faster and improve their overall experience.
The current product upload journey lacked clear explanations for fields, causing confusion and frequent support inquiries. I believed that adding concise explanations and allowing partners to provide more detailed information upfront would reduce confusion and expedite the approval process.
This hypothesis was based on user feedback and observations that partners often felt lost and needed support during the upload process. By making the UI more intuitive and informative, we expected quicker product approvals, enhanced partner satisfaction, and reduced support needs.
Interviewing existing partners from the full spectrum of business size (solo to large).
Reviewing exisiting research.
Compeititor analysis.
Design and Iteration
Treating each section of the product upload form as its own area for iteration, ensuring that I could focus on improving each part individually.
Using consistent UI with recent design updates.
Working closely with engineers to add additional functionality and understand implications of changes.
Testing internally with partner management team
Testing externally with partners
Reviewing and rewriting copy
Results
The initial rollout was delayed, missing the Christmas period, which is one of the busiest times for the company. While this led to some scope creep, it also provided the opportunity to further refine several sections and allowed our developers to implement new functionalities that enhanced the user experience. These improvements, along with the new UI patterns, became applicable across other sections of the process, benefiting future projects.
Once the product upload form was rolled out, new partners were introduced to it and began using it successfully. A good step forward for improving and updating the journey for new partners.
Future Plans
This was to be the first step in updating the UX and UI across the partner platform. The next step would be to bring this journey to the clone product option that existing partners used when adding products.
Conclusion
This rollout demonstrated the effectiveness of our design decisions, as it not only met immediate needs but also set the foundation for future scalability and consistency
