Identifying B2B user profiles and opportunities: From discovery to an implemented solution

The largest textile industry of the Americas wanted to increase their sales by offering a new solution to retail partners

Year: 2021

Role: UX Researcher / Product Designer

Discipline: UX Research

Industry: Retail

Background

This was a project for a textile industry that had their own B2C stores and e-commerce, but wanted to increase their sales in the B2B market - targeting retailers who resell their products.

Goal

I was working in the company as the only UX Researcher & Designer in the B2B team.

The company wanted to strengthen the B2B channel, which was hardly affected by the pandemic, by offering a solution for small and medium size retailers.

My mission was to identify opportunities for the B2B team and understand what would be valuable for retailers.

Methods

• Research: The only data that we had about the retailers was a list with more than 6,000 e-mails. So I decided to first make an online survey in order to get more information about the contacts and recruit participants for interviews. Although the response rate was only 3%, I was able to profile 150 retailers and get a sense of who they were (based on social media activity and the survey answers).

Then, I interviewed 15 retailers remotely, since most of them didn't have access to computer.

• B2B User Profiles: Based on the research data, I developed user profiles. They represented each B2B retailer profile. I grouped them by their business size, tech literacy, selling channels, annual revenue, their needs and pain points.

• Opportunity Mapping: After analyzing and clustering each retailer's needs, I was able to converge into 8 macro opportunities for the business. These opportunities were categorized and detailed through an opportunities map.

• Prototyping: Opportunities were presented to the product and business team. In a series of workshops, we defined what our focus would be, considering a solution that would solve most of the opportunities identified.

  
  

  The prioritized solution was a dropshipping platform that could help retailers sell without holding products in their inventory (related to opportunities 01, 02, 04, 05, 06, and 07). Then, we defined the product strategy together. I developed wireframes and a medium fidelity interactive prototype that can be seen in the video below.

Mural of the process.

Simulation of one early prototype (in Portuguese).

• Concept & Usability Testing: I tested the prototype with 13 retailers. The goal was not only to test its interactions, but also the whole concept of the solution.

  
  

Outcomes

This project was a major success within the company and B2B retail partners. It was impressive to see how much we were able to know and develop with such a limited number of resources and data sources, especially considering that at the beginning of the project we didn't know anything about the retailers.

Along with the Product Owner and development team, we defined the MVP and created a roadmap for future features.

The solution was implemented in more than 200 stores and expanded beyond its original B2B audience to also support B2C stores. After launch, I tracked adoption metrics to understand usage patterns and identify opportunities for continued product improvement.