Adding a New Revenue Source to a Scientific Product Marketplace

MY ROLE

Lead Designer

Company

ZAGENO, a marketplace for scientific laboratory supplies

 

My Quotes, a key screen of this experience, on various devices

project summary

Business case

Quoted orders made up a large chunk of the company’s revenue, but had challenges making a profit. They were handled by legacy processes that relied on PDFs, emailing, and a lot of manual labor. This service didn’t track, measure, or monetize while producing a slow, painful customer experience.

Hypothesis: If we could create a way to order quotes on our platform that brought the advantages of a marketplace, order centralization, approval flow, and accounting efficiencies, we would be able to:

  1. Monetize quote transactions on our platform — grow our GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) by 25% with a commensurate increase in revenue.

  2. Increase engagement, trust and satisfaction with our platform

  3. Compete in an industry that already had mature quote capabilities

  4. Set the stage for more initiatives, such as requesting a quote from within the platform

 

DISCOVERY

Our foundational design research, comprised of in-depth interviews with users of the marketplace, provided the starting point for all design at ZAGENO.

I created this deck to distill the synthesis of our research and socialized it to the Product and Sales teams

 

Customer interviews about quotes

  • We confirmed there was healthy interest in adding Quotes to our existing platform

  • We clarified which scenarios and use cases were most important to our customers

  • We gained a good understanding of what NOT to do

 

When the Product team was ready to kick off the Quotes project, we decided to do a Design Sprint to firm up our thinking and approach to the project.

Artifacts and cheer in San Francisco

This was a 2-day design sprint with seven stakeholders from the Product, Data, and Customer Success teams. They informed us about how things were done currently, what painpoints we might alleviate, and what prospective and current customers would value in the future.

Based on Google’s Design Sprint process, we mapped, sketched, made decisions, wireframed and prototyped.

Sprint Results
The Design Sprint clarified the parameters and priorities of the project: what we would do first, next and maybe in the future.

Participant comments for Sprint retro

 

planning

User Scenarios
From these and other research learnings, we prioritized some 30 potential user scenarios into Critical, Desired, Nice-to-Have, or Out of Scope. I started by designing the best user experience first, and then stepped it down for engineering feasibility and scoping purposes.

Google AI/OCR
We fed hundreds of quotes into Google AI to train it to parse quotes. Since that was not a fail-safe method—sometimes the system would get it wrong—I designed an interface which allowed the user to correct the data that had been brought in.

The value proposition of automatic data parsing for the customer was to alleviate the pain of manual data entry, and to bring quotes into the usual accounting flow.

 

draft design & feedback

Customer research with wireframe prototypes

We presented wireframe prototypes to several customers. The feedback validated that we were on the right track, while prompting us to change a few details.

 

HAND-Off to Developers

Components, key screens, wireframe prototypes, and design specifications

I’ve experimented with different ways to transfer final designs & specifications to engineers, and have arrived at a repeatable, successful framework that contains:

  • High resolution components for visual design

  • Responsive key screens to show entire high resolution page layouts across devices

  • Wireframe prototypes for behavior and flow

  • Design specifications to explain component behavior and any designs that need further clarification

 

outcome

Qualitative feedback showed a positive reception from beta customers

  • As of Sept, 2024, Quotes had been tested with beta users only, and not yet rolled out to GA (General Audience)

  • I helped to define Google Analytics tags to be set up in key areas

  • Hoping for a small bump in usage after this phase comes online

  • Next phases will have more of a chance to move the needle on customer experience and company revenue:

    • “Sharing Quotes” Allowing multiple people to order from the same quote

    • “Request a Quote” – requesting quotes from suppliers through the platform

    • Setting up recurring orders

The first phase of My Quotes sets up a foundation for further experience improvements

 

Summary

Quotes is an area of heightened interest from our customers and untapped business for ZAGENO. The designs served as a foundational step to improve the quote experience and ultimately monetizing the exchange.

We are currently waiting for analytics to come through to prove our hypothesis about Quotes becoming a sticky feature for the platform experience, while continuing to gather qualitative evidence through interviews.