Supplier Link

Background

GroupCollect is a SaaS company building a suite of products to make planning group travel easier for everyone involved. Our team was hired to work on Supplier Link, a product that would allow suppliers to upload and manage information for their group services and products.

Challenge

Four-hundred meetings and a binder full of supplier service data

Every year, suppliers meet with group tour operators at the Student and Youth Travel Association trade show to discuss new service offerings and the state of the industry. During this trade show, attendees have 300-400 back-to-back meetings where they exchange contact information and service sheets. Group tour operators leave the trade show with a binder full of these service sheets, and upon returning to the office, take up to 3 weeks to manually enter the new service data and contact information into their database.

Goal

Make it easier for group tour operators to access up-to-date supplier data

Corey Black, the CEO of GroupCollect, saw a better way to connect group tour operators and suppliers. Our team was responsible for designing and building an MVP that would allow suppliers to upload and manage their service and contact information. That information could then be accessed by group tour operators when they needed it.

Discovery and research

Our team ran an 8-week discovery with the goals of identifying key stakeholders, building shared knowledge, achieving consensus on the problem space, and charting a reasonable path forward for designing and building a new MVP.

What we did:

• Product demo and heuristic evaluation of existing prototype
• Requirements gathering
• Stakeholder interviews
• User interviews
• User personas
• Problem statement workshop

Creating the interaction model and mapping user flows

After we had synthesized our research, I started working on the interaction model and information architecture for the app. With 3 distinct user roles it was important to map user flows based on permissions. I created comprehensive user flows for happy path and error states, dividing functionality by user role.

Improving an existing design system

A product related to Supplier Link (GroupCollect Ops) already had an existing design system when the project started, but some of the patterns weren’t performant when they were tested with users. I collaborated with the lead designer on GroupCollect Ops to start a new design system that would support the whole suite of GroupCollect products while resolving some of the design debt in GroupCollect Ops.

Typeface exploration

Both GroupCollect Ops and Supplier Link use tables frequently. We needed a font that would perform well inside these tables. Inside GroupCollect Ops, Montserrat, a font originally designed to be used on large signs, was working well for headings, but was causing problems for users inside of the tables.

We needed a font that:

• had a similar construction to Montserrat
• was highly legible, especially at smaller sizes
• had more condensed letterforms and leading
• didn’t have any commercial license restrictions
• had multiple weights and tabular figures

I stress tested several fonts and ultimately landed on Noto Sans. This is a good example of how I approach making design decisions.