KeHE Reimagines Order Management:
A Vision for Effortless Efficiency
A Vision for Effortless Efficiency
KeHE, a leading natural food distributor, strives to deliver "goodness" across its entire supply chain. However, their existing order management portal presented challenges for both KeHE and their customers. An outdated user interface and unreliable inventory data created a frustrating experience for retailers, hindering trust and order accuracy.
This project aimed to revolutionize KeHE's order management system. The vision: a dynamic, omni-channel platform offering seamless ordering, real-time information, and unparalleled access to KeHE's services. By prioritizing user experience and functionality, the project aimed to empower retailers and account teams with an Amazon-like search experience, a streamlined checkout process, and improved visibility into invoices, order history, and credits. This transformation not only enhanced customer satisfaction but also drove order volume and retention through a user-centric and efficient platform.
A Rapid, User-centered Design Process
I crafted a project plan to align the Order Management Platform's (OMP) product roadmap and interface design with KeHE’s business goals and the needs of key personas. Under my leadership, I and a team of UX Strategists and Visual Designers conducted 3 rounds of user research paired with rapid design iteration in close collaboration with KeHE's product manager, designers, developers, and SMEs. Multiple, concurrent work streams allowed us to go from initial hypothesis to validated MVP design requirements and deliverables within 3 months.
Business Requirements and Prioritization
Gathered and analyzed information regarding business goals, existing systems, and users to generate a shared understanding of user needs and journey, business context, and high-level requirements.
Deliverables: Business Goals and Success Metrics, Product Vision, Epic-level Story List
Hypothesis and Concept Generation, Interaction Design
Created provisionary personas, user journey, and UI concepts from collaborative sketching for validation during round 1 of user research. Created and updated an interactive prototype to reflect user research findings from rounds 2 and 3.
Deliverables: High-fidelity Prototype, UX Guiding Principles
User Research (3 Rounds)
Validated our understanding of user needs, usability, and usefulness with interviews and 3 rounds of usability testing with KeHE staff and external participants that aligned with target personas.
Deliverables: Research Findings (Rounds 1-3), Validated Personas, Validated User Journey Map
Visual Design
Designed and iterated on concepts for a preliminary product vision, resulting in a finalized visual direction. Applied look-and-feel to key page mocks and style guide that served as the foundation for the KeHE ecosystem look-and-feel.
Deliverables: High-fidelity Mocks, Visual Style Guide
Getting To Know Our Primary Users
We spoke with 41 total participants via moderated, remote sessions with interview questions and usability studies of an interactive prototype and static concept mock.
We learned that target users want a self-service portal where they can research, purchase, and track products carried by KeHE. Accurate information for pricing and availability are critical, along with clear communication when changes occurs that impact their orders.
Participants were segmented into 3 primary user groups: Owners of natural food stores, KeHE Sales Representatives, and large grocer Account Managers.
The following user journey map was created to describe the Customer Order Management Journey along with key players, problems to solve, and touch points with KeHE and 3rd-party systems.
From Concepts to the Final Vision
Our plan was to design an interactive prototype to demonstrate key functionality and interaction patterns to guide the development of high-priority features. The challenge was building the prototype so that we could gather user feedback early and incrementally, to avoid investing too much time fleshing out design patterns that were not a good fit.
The solution was creating two high-level concept prototypes with unique navigation and homepage layouts for testing in Round 1 of research. This way we could determine the best approach for these fundamental areas of the experience and confidently layer in additional fidelity to be validated in future rounds of research.
Each round of updates and research lead to refinement of the interactive prototype and strengthened our understanding of user needs along with pain points. After incorporating feedback from Round 3 of research we had a validated interactive prototype that was a reflection of business goals, high-level requirements, and user research insights.
A sitemap and user flows were also created in collaboration with KeHE staff to provide details for information architecture and how users navigate through the platform to complete key tasks.
Following the completion of Round 1 of research, we created initial look-and-feel concepts modeled after the interactive prototype that was being elaborated on in preparation for testing in Round 2.
Stakeholder feedback and existing brand guidelines led to the creation of a consolidated look-and-feel which served as the foundation for visual direction of the entire platform and future KeHE applications.
These key page mocks demonstrated styling of the application (desktop, tablet portrait, and smartphone), global components, and components specific to the Order Management Platform to guide development of the use interface.
Style guidelines and components defined for OM provided a foundation for KeHE digital products from that point on.
Establishing a User-centric Culture
The team and I continued to support KeHE's user experience strategy and design needs across several products for the next two years. The goal was to establish a culture of UX at the organization and grow their internal UX team to support all research and design needs in-house.
As their interim User Experience Lead, I introduced regular UX ceremonies and advocated for consistent touch points with development and product managers. This cross-functional collaboration was pivotal to developing a shared vision for KeHE products, understanding priorities, perceiving technical implications, and staying in touch with user needs.
We advised KeHE to plan for recurrent rounds of research in order to answer:
What’s the right thing to build?
By developing relationships with users KeHE could have regular interactions with participants that align with target personas, e.g. advisory board. Another phase of discovery research could determined usefulness and priority of new features.
By developing relationships with users KeHE could have regular interactions with participants that align with target personas, e.g. advisory board. Another phase of discovery research could determined usefulness and priority of new features.
How do we build it right? Did we build it right?
After formulating a hypothesis, KeHE could conduct small experiments to optimize and validate interaction patterns and usefulness of key features. Tactics like benchmarking, usability testing, and A/B testing with live environments would be particularly cost-effective and yield valuable user feedback.
After formulating a hypothesis, KeHE could conduct small experiments to optimize and validate interaction patterns and usefulness of key features. Tactics like benchmarking, usability testing, and A/B testing with live environments would be particularly cost-effective and yield valuable user feedback.
In my final weeks supporting KeHE I interviewed and trained their new Lead User Experience Strategist, in addition to laying the foundation for their designOps processes.
