What is Sedex?

Sedex is a global leader in supply chain data exchange, empowering businesses to make responsible and ethical decisions by providing transparency into supplier networks. The platform focuses on enabling retailers and suppliers to assess risks and ensure compliance, offering critical insights into Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metrics. With a growing user base and increasing complexities in supply chains, Sedex faced challenges in scaling its capabilities.

Problem Highlight

Sedex faced a major challenge in managing the growing complexity of supplier networks, which led to difficulties in navigation, data management, and maintaining effective communication across the platform. Users were struggling with inefficient visibility controls, cumbersome navigation, and outdated systems that failed to keep up with their needs. Our goal was to resolve these issues by creating a more intuitive, scalable platform that enhanced data visibility, improved workflows, and ultimately simplified the user experience.

Our goal

Our goal was to create a more intuitive and scalable platform, enhancing data visibility, improving navigation, and enabling more informed decision-making.

Navigating Complexity and Improving Data Management

To familiarise myself with the platform and understand the journeys within my product team, I mapped out the entire new platform. This exercise provided a clear visual overview of the platform’s structure, highlighting key user interactions and potential areas for improvement.

The complexity of Sedex's user base was growing significantly. As more businesses joined the platform, the task of managing intricate supplier networks became more overwhelming for users. Our user research identified several pain points:

Initial findings

• Complex Supplier Networks: Users struggled to manage vast networks of suppliers and partners.
• Outdated User Interface: The platform's UI design was no longer scalable, resulting in a poor user experience.
• Inefficient Data Management: Data visibility controls were cumbersome and time-consuming.
• Communication Gaps: The reliance on outdated notification systems led to frequent missed updates, resulting in communication breakdowns and decision-making delays.

These challenges drove the redesign efforts, aiming to build a more user-centric, efficient, and flexible system.

Extracting User Insights and Internal Expertise

The project kicked off with a deep discovery phase to ensure our redesign was firmly grounded in user needs. This included comprehensive user research activities designed to understand the intricacies of managing expanding supply chain networks. The key methods included:

• User Interviews: We conducted interviews with existing users from various industries. These sessions were instrumental in highlighting the real-world challenges users faced, such as difficulty navigating the complex supplier structure and confusion around data visibility controls. These sessions offered us qualitative insights into user frustrations and desires.
• Moderated Testing: During moderated testing sessions, users interacted with the existing platform as we observed their behaviour. This helped us identify usability bottlenecks, such as issues with navigation and confusing workflows.
• Exploratory Workshops: We ran workshops with internal experts and company executives to extract insights on problems and potential solutions. This helped us gather detailed needs on data visibility and identify key communication gaps, such as missed or delayed updates, affecting decision-making and efficiency.

The outcome of this discovery phase was a detailed problem statement, focusing on the need for more efficient navigation, better data management tools, and clear, scalable interfaces.

Research & Data Analysis

We took a blended approach of qualitative and quantitative research to validate our initial findings and inform the design direction:

• User Analytics & Heatmaps: Leveraging Google Analytics and Hotjar, we tracked user interactions, identifying areas where users struggled the most. Heatmaps allowed us to visualise which parts of the interface users frequently engaged with and where they dropped off.
• User Recordings: Observing user recordings helped us pinpoint specific areas of friction—particularly with managing visibility settings and navigating the Link Summary feature. For example, many users faced issues differentiating between their own company's data and linked companies' data.
• Prototyping & Unmoderated Testing: To quickly iterate on our ideas, we developed POCs and conducted unmoderated testing sessions. These allowed us to rapidly gather user feedback and make informed iterations, ensuring we were on the right track without heavy upfront investments in full-feature designs.

Improtant Insights

• Complexity & Usability Challenges: Users found managing large supplier networks overwhelming due to confusing navigation and inefficient visibility controls. Key friction points made it difficult for them to complete essential tasks efficiently.
• Communication Gaps: Users highlighted poor communication within the platform, primarily due to ineffective notification methods that led to missed updates and hindered real-time decision-making.
• Interface Friction & Scalability Issues: Analytics revealed that the interface lacked scalability and clear navigation paths, especially as supply chains grew. There were significant drop-off points where users abandoned workflows due to frustration.

Together, these insights demonstrated a need for more intuitive navigation, efficient visibility controls, better communication tools, and a scalable interface design to handle complex supply networks effectively. These guided the development of the three core design concepts to streamline and enhance the user experience.

Simplifying Complexity

Before starting with wireframes, we focused on mapping out the early-stage user journeys and defining the "happy paths" for key user interactions. This phase was heavily influenced by the insights gathered during our research and discovery process. We used our understanding of user pain points, preferences, and behaviours to identify the most critical tasks and ensure each journey addressed users' core needs.

After mapping out early-stage user journeys and happy paths, guided by our research insights, I began sketching initial concepts aimed at addressing key user challenges. Once these concepts were drafted, I collaborated with the team to shortlist the ideas that seemed most promising in solving the identified issues. We chose the strongest concepts to move forward with and planned to validate them during our annual Sedex conference, where we could experiment and gather feedback from live members in real time, ensuring that our proposed solutions were tested directly with the end users in a realistic setting.

The insights from our research and discovery highlighted three core problems faced by users managing complex supplier relationships, lack of efficient data visibility, and difficulty navigating the existing outdated interface. To address these issues, I prototyped three key concepts—Tube Map, Tree List, and Supply Chain Top Sheet—each aimed at solving specific pain points:

• Tube Map Concept: Users were overwhelmed by the complexity of their supply chain connections. We came up with the Tube Map concept to test if a simple, visual overview inspired by transport maps could make it easy to see relationships clearly and help users quickly understand the entire network.
• Tree List Concept: Users struggled to navigate their extensive supplier networks. We came up with the Tree List to test if providing a hierarchical, expandable structure would allow users to break down their network into manageable parts, simplifying navigation and reducing frustration.
• Supply Chain Top Sheet and Link Summary Page: Users needed both a broad overview of their supply chain and detailed control over individual links. We came up with the Supply Chain Top Sheet and Link Summary Page to test if providing a quick, summary-level insight along with precise visibility controls would enable users to seamlessly transition between high-level and detailed data management.

Concepts validation

After gathering feedback from live testing and in-person research, we observed that preferences were split between two main visual approaches. This led us to rethink how to integrate the strengths of both designs into a cohesive solution.

Linear Version (Tube map):

• Half of the participants preferred this version for its clean and simple design.
• However, it was noted that it might not represent the full complexity of supply chains effectively.

Tree View Version:

• The other half preferred this version as it more accurately represented the intricacies of supply chains.
• Concerns were raised that it could become overwhelming when scaled to large supply chains.

Evolved into Tree List

We began by mapping out the existing user journeys to identify areas where users experienced friction—often referred to as "unhappy paths." These paths revealed key pain points, such as difficulties in navigating large supplier networks and confusion about hierarchical relationships among suppliers. Understanding these challenges allowed us to pinpoint opportunities to significantly improve the user experience.

To ensure that our approach was feasible from both a design and technical perspective, we worked closely with the development team before diving into design sketches. Together, we conducted data architecture exercises to help developers understand the existing data structure, which played a crucial role in how we planned to integrate new designs seamlessly. This close collaboration ensured that the technical and design teams were fully aligned on requirements from the start.

We also created user stories to make sure we were considering the user experience in a holistic manner. These user stories described tasks from the user’s point of view and helped ensure that every feature and design decision was guided by real user needs and intended behaviours.

With user insights and technical understanding, I sketched concepts to address the identified pain points. After multiple iterations, we reached a final design that balanced user needs with platform capabilities, resulting in the Tree View—a hierarchical visualization that organized complex supplier relationships in an approachable way.

Validating the Tree List concept

As we moved into testing, feedback indicated that users needed even greater control and flexibility when navigating their networks. They wanted the ability to easily move between a high-level overview and specific details. In response, the Tree View evolved into the Tree List—a more dynamic and flexible version that allowed users to expand or collapse different nodes, providing both broad overviews and in-depth information when needed.

Our rapid iteration process involved close collaboration with developers to use Material UI components, ensuring we could move quickly without sacrificing quality. These development exercises, paired with user story mapping, were instrumental in aligning the entire team to deliver a design solution that addressed user needs while being technically practical to implement.

Metrics of Success:

• 30% Reduction in Time Spent Managing Data: The Tree List’s structured, intuitive navigation made it significantly easier for users to manage their supplier networks, cutting down on the time needed for these tasks.
• Improvement in User Satisfaction: Post-launch surveys indicated a clear increase in user satisfaction, with many users praising the simplified navigation of complex supplier networks.

Evolved into Link Summary Page

The reason for developing the Tube Map Concept was to give users the opportunity to zoom into more detailed data about their supply chain. From the full network shown in the Tree List, we wanted to enable users to dive deeper into specific supply pathways, allowing them to see the detailed data they needed to understand and take action on.

The Tube Map provided a high-level visualisation inspired by transport maps, helping users understand how goods flowed across their supply chain. This approach was effective in simplifying complex, multi-layered relationships into a more digestible form, making it easier for users to grasp the overall structure.

How did we come to this conclusion?

As we gathered feedback, it became clear that users needed both this broader overview and the ability to manage specific details of individual relationships. This insight led to the evolution of the Tube Map into the Link Summary Page, which allowed users to focus on individual supplier connections and manage data visibility more effectively.

We followed the same iterative process as the Tree List concept to refine and validate the Link Summary Page. This approach ensured that the final design was both user-friendly and aligned with technical requirements.

Metrics of Success:

• 25% Increase in User Satisfaction: The introduction of the Link Summary Page led to a significant increase in user satisfaction, as users appreciated the improved clarity and ease of navigation between high-level views and specific details.
• 40% Reduction in User Confusion: The streamlined interface and enhanced visual clarity led to a substantial reduction in user confusion when managing their supply chain data.
• Enhanced Task Efficiency: Users reported greater efficiency in managing supplier relationships, as they could quickly access detailed information, reducing the time spent navigating through the platform.

Contributing to the Larger Ecosystem

With this project, I advocated for the use of atomic components in our Design System and Storybook libraries. This approach ensured that the components we created were modular, reusable, and adaptable, benefiting both current and future projects.

I also led efforts to train the team about design tokens and semantic tokens, helping them understand how these tokens could create a more flexible and consistent design system. By introducing tokens, we laid the foundation for a more scalable and adaptive approach to maintaining and extending the visual language of our platform.

The components designed for the Tree List and Link Summary Page were incorporated into Sedex’s broader design system:

• Reusable Components: These new elements enriched the Components Library, providing a foundation for future projects across the product teams. This helped create consistency in the platform and allowed other teams to build on a unified design language.

Outcome:

• Encouraged design consistency across different teams within Sedex, which improved the user experience across multiple touchpoints.
• Reduced development time by 20%, which led to a 10% reduction in production costs.
• Users mentioned in surveys that they appreciated the consistency in the new platform compared to the old one, which made their experience more seamless and intuitive.

Metrics that Matter

The redesign significantly enhanced user experience and improved overall efficiency across the platform. Our key metrics and performance indicators (KPIs) included:

• 30% Reduction in Time Spent Managing Data: Streamlined navigation and intuitive UI elements resulted in users spending significantly less time managing data visibility and navigating supplier networks.
• 25% Increase in User Satisfaction Scores: Post-launch surveys indicated a marked improvement in user satisfaction, with many users specifically appreciating the clarity and accessibility of the new interface.
• 40% Decrease in Data Errors: Enhanced visibility controls and clearer delineation of linked data led to a reduction in errors related to data management.
• 15% Boost in Customer Retention: Improved user experience contributed to higher engagement and retention rates, as users found it easier to manage their networks.
• Enhanced Task Efficiency: Users reported greater efficiency in managing supplier relationships, as they could quickly access detailed information, reducing the time spent navigating through the platform.
• Increased User Trust: Users' trust in the platform increased due to the clearer visibility of data. The extra tiers provided more granular visibility, helping users understand their supply chain relationships better and assess risks more accurately.

What did I learn?

• User-Centric Design Is Transformational: Engaging deeply with users from the outset was crucial to understanding their real needs and pain points. Mapping unhappy paths and refining based on feedback allowed us to transform a complex platform into something approachable and efficient. Listening to users and iterating quickly based on their input had a direct, measurable impact on satisfaction and platform success.
• Cross-Team Collaboration Drives Success: The close collaboration between designers, developers, and product managers was pivotal. Conducting data architecture exercises, writing user stories, and ensuring that everyone involved understood the end-user’s needs meant that technical feasibility was aligned with user experience from start to finish. The collaborative work on atomic components and tokens also set the foundation for a stronger, more reusable design system.
• Iterative Validation Through Experimentation: The importance of continuously experimenting and validating ideas cannot be overstated. Testing early sketches, prototyping, and running live experiments at the Sedex conference helped validate our concepts, leading to more informed decisions. This iterative process ensured that we were always building in the right direction.
• Building a Scalable Design System Benefits the Whole Organisation: Advocating for the use of atomic components and semantic tokens wasn’t just about making this project successful; it laid the groundwork for a more efficient and scalable design system. By enriching the design system with reusable components, we reduced future development time and enabled design consistency across Sedex products, ultimately improving customer retention.
• Clearer Visibility Equals Increased Trust: A key insight was that improved data visibility leads to enhanced user trust. The additional tiers of visibility introduced in the Link Summary Page not only made the supply chain relationships clearer but also empowered users to understand and manage risks more effectively. This had a direct impact on user confidence in the platform.

The team

What disciplines did I collaborate with? Notable mentions:

• Catrina Speakman: Product manager
• Jordan Stewart: Tech Lead promotes to Tech Principal
• Vanessa Virgitti: Tech Lead
• Waqas Raza: QA Tester
• Uladzislau Pinchuk: Front End Developer
• Anton Kasyan: Full Stack Developer
• Volha Trafimava: Agile Delivery Coordinator
• Viachaslau Maisiuk: Full Stack Developer
• Anastasiya Rutkouskaya: Full Stack Developer
• Pavel Tarasenka: Front End Developer

Adding to the previously introduced members, we also have those working in multiple teams who've made noteworthy contributions to Synergy.

• Tina Ubhi: User Researcher
• Charlotte Thornalley: UX Writer
• Phillip Law: Product and Implementation Analyst
• Will Meyers: Frontend Architect

Our team has experienced changes in personnel over the course of the project. Some members have left, while others have joined during this time.