Quick overview of the current software version

As soon as I got hired for the project and when I was granted with a login access, I decided to use the B2B platform as if I was a new retailer, coming here for the first time. I like first impressions, it’s always interesting. It could be experiences or when meeting a person for the first time. (A teacher told me years ago while at University, “you never have a second chance to make a good first impression”. This sticked with me up until today)

The company also gave me their internal statistics of their B2B website, such as visits, country of origin, average orders and turnover.

So I visited the B2B site, made many notes, screenshots, observations. I decided to purchase a couple of products from the physical workbook I was given and went all the way to the very last step, which is usually the button “confirm purchase”.

Needless to say that many issues were already apparent across the platform and I was looking forward to hearing from the users themselves on my next qualitative and quantitative researches.

Qualitative user research

First thing, I decided to perform a qualitative research. This would start to give me an overview on both who the users are and where the issues were hiding.

I was lucky enough to moderate usability testing with 10 retailers who kindly agreed. During the usability testing, participants were given tasks to complete, and I tracked the participants’ progress. I also observed their interactions with the B2B current platform dug deeper into points of interest. I noted any point of frustration, pain points, errors, satisfaction and challenges they expressed.

The pattern became clear very quickly, where I could start to see what were the users motivation to use our platform and what was discouraging them to go through the process or come back using it.

Interviews with current users

The usability testings I moderated were conducted on Zoom.

I started by thanking the user for taking the time of this test and briefly explained who I was and what I was doing.

A couple of general questions were also asked, such as the “age”, “gender”, “position”, “do you consider yourself as tech savvy”, “do you use any B2B website”, “when and where do you use the B2B site”, “how often”, etc.

Then I recorded their screen while I asked them to perform the following task:

• You are a retailer, and you need to restock on the following SKU’s ahead of the holidays.

• Login to the SFA B2B Ronhill site, look for these SKU’s, add them to your cart, and authorize the asap order.

• I asked them to detail out loud everything they were seeing on screen and every step.

• What issues are you experiencing now?

Key insights derived from the interviews

• Users are mostly male, aged from 30 to 50 and are sales assistant or manager. 80% already use other B2B site to reorder while 15% still prefer to call their sales rep to place an order. (old fashion mostly, but they prefer to do it this way as they enjoy maintaining a relationship with an human - sales rep - and have a chat while!). 5% aren’t really concerned by reordering in season.

• 25% were not even aware that the Ronhill brand had a B2B site available. (problem of communication on our end?)

• The landing page is confusing as the display imagery doesn’t match with their activity (there is an image of a climber in a snowy mountain while our customers here are running stores)

• 3 users had their password not working.

• Site is slow to load.

• After login in, the user land on a shipping address selection page, which seems unnecessary as all of them only had one delivery address for their store.

• Once the user selected his shipping address, he had to once again choose which catalog range (brands) he would to purchase products from. This is confusing and add too many steps. (While the OSC group owns indeed many brands, our running stores only have access to Ronhill running products, this should be the default choice)

• Loading product page seems long to many users.

• The product page has a lot informations all over the place! (top bar crowded with name, burger menu, cart, language, then another bar underneath it with filters that take a lot of space, some products references are cut when too long)

• Finding a specific product seemed challenging.

• The product details page contains a lot of useless empty infos for our users. Only one small photo of the product isn’t a great selling point. The process to add a product to the cart is very confusing with only one “add to cart” button. User has to enter the quantity they need, for various sizes (if required) and hit the “add to cart button”. Once this button is pushed, the user cannot add any extra size/qty in this window. It will have to be later in the cart detail summary.

• Too many steps… Once done shopping, the user needs to click on the generic cart button in the top bar, that brings a pop-up window of the cart detail, which isn’t really a cart detail at this stage. The user then needs to click again on this pop-up to “view products in cart”… Which brings finally the user to the cart details (hooray!!!!)

• The user can review the cart, edit if required. Again, it will take another 3 clicks to complete the order…

Quantitative research

I did an online survey using Google Forms to gather more informations on the users. A total of 30 people responded which helped me in framing the problems correctly.

Brainstorming

Based on the user interviews, online survey and after listed all issues, we started brainstorming on the important features, redesigns and solution we could address.

I listed priorities from the observations I made during the interview and tests.

I also made sure to keep in mind the stakeholders main objectives all the long this process:

• I need to improve the whole user experience of placing an order through the B2B platform.

• Improving the user experience would lead to more orders.

• More orders would mean an increase of turnover, deeply wished by the stakeholders.

Persona

Thanks to all the data collected from the interviews and survey, I created a persona representing a typical user of the current platform.

The persona helped me arrive at better solutions as it gave an in-depth understanding of the user goals, frustrations and the overall personality.

Solutions

There was a lot of issues to address in order to improve the whole user experience throughout the ordering process.

• Imagery and design : more modern and related to running.

• Top bar is brand new, simplified, cleaner.

• Less clicks from the login page to the confirmation order.

• Cart price displayed at all time in the top right corner.

• New cart design feature rolling over from the right side of the screen.

• Added edit features directly in the cart.

• Simplify the interface, better user friendly experience.

• Adding quantities/products on the product detail page totally redesigned, with less distracting infos.

• Blurred/darker background when the product detail page comes up.

• Added picture to the profile brings human touch.

• Simplify content of the profile page down to 3 items. (Infos, password, invoice history)

• Shipping address is not set by default, no need to select it each time the user logs in.

• Catalog of brands is set by default. We already know from our DB which catalog the user should see when login in. This removes an extra step where the user had to select among only one catalog the brand he was shopping for.

• Added features for the company to promote deals within the site.

• Filters list now on the side, easier and using less space than on top

• Unified search now on the top center, making it the first go-to place when the user is looking for something. (inputs can be name of the product, SKU, reference, keyword)

• Removed List/Card view option.

• Language selection is now on the footer, as well as the social links.

Another interesting insight from the user research was the fact that 50% didn’t even know that Ronhill® had a B2B platform.

What’s the point of having the best B2B platform if our users don’t even know it exists?

That’s why I also suggested the following actions to take for the company ahead of the deployment of the new B2B platform :

• Send a newsletter to all retailers/customers to let them know about our B2B platform, the redesign and improvement.

• Incentive to drive sales up : special discount for any new order placed on the new site.

• Sales reps to talk to their retailers by phone and demonstrate the platform while visiting them.

• Online quick training.