Problem origin

As we were conducting all the workshops for both the Linking and the Supply Projects some themes stood out regarding our members’ current experiences with owning their data and keeping up with all the data changes in the platform. Members wanted to:

• Each linked company might have hundreds of sites, making it hard to find the correct site when looking for a specific site to change the visibility controls.
• There is a current lack of communication with the users about any changes that might occur related to any of their links.
• The platform currently pushes all possible communications about platform notifications on email inboxes, formatted with our email templates.
• The abundance of emails for big organisations makes many emails difficult to handle, making our users’ work lives hard.
• The current visibility controls are on a pop-up which doesn’t support our future vision as a design team, to make the website mobile-friendly.
• The Link Summary pop-up doesn't show our users who they are linked to and what their relationship is with the other company.
• The Link Summary pop-up makes it hard to understand which one is the user’s company and which company are they looking at.

Other usability problems

Due to the above insights taken from user workshops, I decided to do an audit to our existing communications sent to our users related to their links, and also their experiences when it comes to managing the visibility of data shared with other members.

I audited the functionality using the following methods:

• Communicate with our Product Analyst to get some tracking on each element and understand the funnels of successful visibility management control changes.
• Create heat maps using tracking from both Google Analytics and Hotjar.
• Watch random recordings of users using the site visibility functionality.
• Run unmoderated tests to understand specific pain points from scripted tasks.
• Map out the journey and audit from a UX best practices perspective.
• The Link Summary pop-up doesn't show our users who they are linked to and what is their relationship with the other company.
• The Link Summary pop-up makes it hard to understand which one is the user’s company and which company are they looking at.

The results from the usability exploration were:

• There is too much content to add on a layover modal.
• There is too much content behind the modal and it distracts from the major task that the user needs to focus on.
• There is too little space in case we need to add more functionality to give users more power to own their data.
• The language is too confusing to explain the actions accurately.

Quick win

The first thing that we all agreed on was that we needed a way to search and find a company site faster and more efficiently. So the easiest and quickest decision was to give users the ability to search through the Site management table.

So we added a search function. As a best practice, I quickly noticed that this page is gaining even more content and major functionality, which is something we want to avoid.

So we added a search function. As a best practice, I quickly noticed that this page is gaining even more content and major functionality, which is something we want to avoid.

After this, the main thing that we all agreed on, was that we needed to tidy up the missed communications sent from our platform and keep the users up to date with the latest changes for each of their links. This means that we need a form of notification centre in the platform.

New concepts in the platform

After this, the main thing that we all agreed on, was that we needed to tidy up the missed communications

• Can we have some in-platform updates to help users manage their links and keep up to date with the latest?
• Can we create something that represents a visualisation of a Link to help users understand their relationships with other companies easier?
• If a pop-up modal is gaining too much content, we need to consider making it a page. What parts of the platform could be improved by such an experience?

Because of the above, we thought that it will be beneficial to re-invent the modal with Site visibility controls. So I started by putting some potential solutions on the current experience according to what we heard from our calls with members.

I came up with a concept to introduce a notification centre on the platform and collected important notifications such as

• Link requests
• Link changes
• Assessment reminders
• Risk assessment completed by suppliers when requested

I later found out that doing an all-platform notification centre is not something that we can engage with now because this would:

• Require the involvement of all product teams.
• More resources that we can currently allocate.
• Cost more to build than the company can afford.

This got me back to the drawing board and I came up with another idea. This idea would still keep the concept of in-platform updates, but it would be exclusive to each link.

This meant that we would keep an even tracking API for our product team only, because secured a buy-in from the stakeholders and we had the capacity to build an in-platform “Updates” experience for members.

Building this feature for Link updates only, meant that it wouldn’t need to be platform-wide while still giving our users important updates on the platform, about their links. Something that we found out that is needed when talking to the members during our research sessions.

Experimenting

At first, I started by putting the Site visibility management on its own page. The idea was to evolve the Site visibility modal to a full Link Summary page to help users focus on their task, explain what they see on the Link and provide additional information by giving important updates about the link.

This decision was driven by the clear results from our members’ feedback that an “Updates” section would be extremely helpful for their day-to-day work tasks.

I created a new page with a consistent layout to the previous Links page and played around with changing the hierarchy on the page, by moving the top “Commercial relationship” section down just above the footer.

We decided to get some tracking on the modal to understand which features are the most used and help us define the hierarchy.

At the same time, I took this concept and tested it with both live users as well as unmoderated tests on usertesting.com.
The results from this exploratory work were:

• The commercial section is too important.
• Designing the updates section as a tab confuses the users with the other tabs - Active & Inactive sites.
• Users need to see more visual context to help them understand the link.
• Taking Site Management to its own page helps users consume the data they need, with positive experience.
• Generally, adding an “Updates” section is a very nice idea.

How it works

Now a member can view their entire link summary on a new page. The new page keeps track of all the updates that have happened in a link, it allows the users to change any visibility they want about the link.

During our discovery for the supply chain project we also discovered that a way to show one’s supply chain would be something similar to a “Tube map” (London Underground). So I thought that this was the perfect opportunity to introduce this concept with our current link structure.

This “Tube stops” concept responds to the users’ problem to help them understand who they are in a link and what’s their relationship with the other members in a link. The feature can be seen below the header.

Results

• We contributed to the company KPI: 80% of all journeys to be completed on the new platform by the end of 2023. We achieved 86% by the end of 2023.
• Customer retention increased from 85% to 95%.
• The new page was frequently mentioned in positive feedback from customers to the customer-facing departments.