Client
Vendoor
Industry
B2B
Retail
Services
Product design
Platform
Web app
Mobile app
My role
Product designer
Timeline
Oct 2023 - Now
The Vendoor team wanted me to help them design an MVP for their product to showcase to investors and potential customers. They had not only researched how the retail industry works with vendors and contractors, but they had actively done some of the work themselves. This gave them first-hand evidence of the shortcomings with how this work gets done.
Here's a story from Vendoor's CTO —
I got locked overnight in the attic of a well-known clothing store in the mall. That's the short version. Somewhere, someone, broadly speaking, knew I was scheduled at that store on that night, but their visibility of my visit stopped there.
It's a funny story (in hindsight), but it is one example of hundreds where I witnessed or lived the real-world implications of not knowing exactly who is at a location, why they're there, and when they're there.
Ultimately, all of these stories became the inspiration for Vendoor.
Adam Davis
(co)founder & CTO
Vendoor App
As the lead product designer, I helped:
wireframe the MVP experience for desktop and mobile contexts
visualize the primary tasks that users would accomplish in the system
design content for the check-in and check-out forms
elevate the visibility of vendor status and on-site duration time
THE CHALLENGE
The current process for retail companies to keep track of on-site vendors and contractors is a manual one. It involves:
maintaining spreadsheets, databases, and paperwork of vendors and related work details
constant monitoring of vendors and their work status, where human error can result in real-world consequences (like getting locked into the attic of a clothing store after-hours)
check-in and check-out processes which aren't optimized for real-time usage, resulting in job status inconsistencies
check-out processes that don't include all of the relevant details to finish up specific jobs
an inability to provide reporting capabilities, such as end-of-day data
a lack of real-time support for vendors in need
The goal
The primary goal of Vendoor at this stage was to show investors and potential customers the challenges in the retail space and our solution that addresses them. This would involve an MVP-level design that visualizes the product.
For customers, we wanted to show them:
the high-level flow for our customers, from check-in to check-out
functionality that would revolutionize the current, manual process, such as maintaining a database of users and associated actions
value added to retail companies through record-keeping and asynchronous task completion
IDEATION
While the final solution would need to address multiple user groups interacting within the same system, such as retail store managers and vendors, we began our focus with the retail store manager group. This was decided for the following reasons:
Retail store managers are responsible for the organization of vendors and their work, superseding the responsibilities of those users
Retail store managers have an array of diverse tasks that need to be accomplished in the system
Retail stores are also the customers of the product, so gathering early feedback from them is critical
DESIGN
Our initial design was a dashboard view that addressed all of our initial problems that were identified from a retail manager perspective.
This dashboard helped our retail manager users by:
showing the list of active, on-site vendors at a glance
highlighting key information related to job status, such as duration onsite
providing key details of vendors, including who they are and what they're working on
allowing them to check-in and check-out vendors if assistance is needed
allowing them the ability to group related contractors into groups
A mobile view of the product would be helpful at this stage to showcase with customers who regularly do their tasks on the go.
iOS patterns were utilized initially with Android patterns coming down the road.
Next Steps
My work with Vendoor is ongoing and priorities can quickly change as the startup grows. Some key next steps we have in mind:
Validate our design direction with customers and retail manager users
Add functionality based on feedback with users
Shift research and design focus to our secondary user group, the vendors
Check back for more updates to see further progress with Vendoor!
