First, a quick summary of my time at Wayfair

I joined Wayfair as the first hire and Design Lead for the newly established Data Insights team.

Among our product launches during my tenure with Insights were a new Report Center and Business Performance Dashboard for Wayfair's suppliers.

During those projects, it became clear that we needed alignment on data visualization heuristics and guidelines. I took on that project, which led to a partnership with the Patterns Team to integrate my findings into the design system guidelines.

Through surviving multiple layoffs and subsequent reorgs, I also spent significant time on Wayfair’s Help & Education and Workflow & Pipeline teams, where I led the redesign of the Help Center and worked to simplify the complex workflow for 3D modeling on product pages.

While navigating shifting business needs and team assignments, I was able to target a few additional goals during my time at Wayfair by identifying a few opportunities unique to the scale and resources of a large e-commerce organization. Specifically, I took advantage of extra opportunities to mentor junior designers and students outside of my teams, and sharpen my knowledge of the evolving accessibility (a11y) landscape. After taking internal and external training courses, I became the Accessibility Captain for my assigned business unit. In that role, I held regular office hours to help other teams work through gaps in their projects, and provided feedback on in-progress work.

Our Starting Point

Our first product launch for First Visualizations was an updated Report Center, which included extensive supplier research and input from a separate project I ran in tandem: updating data visualization guidelines for both my product team and the Patterns (design system) team.

The Problem

As with plenty of legacy experiences at established businesses, there was an existing pain point our team needed to address and an opportunity to provide more value. Suppliers needed a way to quickly access their data to get a full view of their business. With that data, we would generate a reporting solution to provide suppliers with accessible data insights and visualizations to help them better understand and optimize their business performance on Wayfair.

Many of Wayfair’s suppliers had a significant presence with other major retailers such as Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Home Depot, so the floor for our team was to match the datasets provided by competitors.

Suppliers faced several challenges with existing reports:

• Data was not available
• Suppliers would consistently complain, through research sessions, surveys, and support tickets, that data they needed to succeed with Wayfair was not available to them.
• Data was not easily accessible, or was distributed across different tools
• Within Partner Home, data was often available within domain-specific tools and pages. I.e., if a Supplier wanted pricing data, they would go to Pricing Tools. If they want merchandising data, they go to Merch Tools, etc. There was no centralized repository to combine data from multiple domains.
• Information was often presented in legacy or "Wayfair-centric" formats rather than supplier-friendly views
• With some exceptions, most of the data available in Partner Home was available in a format that reflected how it was used and understood internally at Wayfair rather than how Suppliers needed to use and understand it. E.g., Wayfair has a definition of a SKU which may not reflect a Supplier org’s understanding. Insights like that demonstrated that we did not understand how Suppliers needed Wayfair data into their workflows and systems.
• Limited visualization capabilities made it difficult to identify trends and insights
• Reports were almost all downloadable spreadsheets. Suppliers were on their own to keep file history, and develop visualizations an insights on their end. In some respects, we were lagging behind the competition when it came to what Suppliers expected.

The Ask

Our team’s parent org, Global Supplier Technology (GST), was on a mission to design easy-to-use, transparent experiences for Suppliers. Providing access to rich data would be a critical part of the experience, and the responsibility of the Insights team.

So, to simplify that ask, our goal for PartnerHome Reports and all future Insights projects was to give suppliers the data and insight they needed to help them maximize their wins when selling with Wayfair.

Discovery and Research

Persona Development

In some roles earlier in my career, personas could often feel like checking a box in the UX process. During my time on Insights at Wayfair, we had specific users we could point to for every business requirement, and a roster of willing research participants for just about every use case. That meant that across teams at GST we had an evolving, and very accurate, collection of users and their specific needs.

Along with our User Research partners, we created four primary personas, as well as their reporting needs. We built the personas and assumptions out of real conversations during early research sessions in our discovery phase.

Competitive Landscape

Reports are not an offering unique to Wayfair, and PartnerHome was not a unique platform for our users. In fact, it’s just about guaranteed that a Supplier selling on Wayfair also sells with other retailers. Since we were building on top of a business tool, there was no reason to lean into novelty. We had to offer our users a relatively familiar experience in order to meet our goals and allow them to do their work.

We dug into the seller platforms of three competitors as part of our research: Amazon, Walmart, and Overstock. We documented our findings to understand their information architecture and establish a feature baseline and differentiation between PartnerHome and the competition.

We distilled our IA findings and recommendations down to four major recommendations:

1. Reports should live in the left nav under the name “Reports”
1. All competitors gave their respective Reports pages a prime space in their navigation. We found some other competitors who used the term Analytics, but our users consistently told us Reports was a more clear title. Along with our expertise our Content Design colleagues and data from our UX Research colleagues, we were confident in choosing the Reports nomenclature.
2. Remove the separate Download Center
1. Wayfair initially had a separate location where all downloaded reports could land. We didn’t find a similar page on any competitor platform, and none of our research subjects found ours useful. If they needed a report again, they preferred to download the latest report and filter data locally. Multiple users made comments along the lines of, “I already have my own Download Center: my local downloads folder.”
3. Allow for the ability to see different data views
1. All competitors, and many dashboards across industries, allowed the user to toggle between data visualizations and table views. Our research subjects, even within job roles/personas, did not align on their preferred views. Some people live in tables, and some people are visual-first, so we had to accommodate both.
4. Don’t separate insight data
1. Actionable insights, especially if they are based on anomalies or major changes in a given dataset, should be presented within the context of a Supplier’s workflow rather than hidden away in a separate navigation item. Most of our competitors who had established insight products had implemented something similar, with names like Opportunity Compass, Growth Opportunities, and Performance. Integrating Wayfair’s recommendations for success directly into Report Center would better align with the competition and Suppliers’

Through the same process, alongside our Product partners and consulting with Suppliers, we studied our competitors and built out a feature baseline and differentiation matrix for PartnerHome and their respective tools.

The features study and resulting matrix gave us specific targets and points of discussion when working with suppliers during our research sessions. Of course, we weren’t reinventing the wheel. We had an idea of what we were building, and our suppliers had strong feelings of what they needed.

Solutions and Data Visualization Fundamentals

Data Visualization Guidelines

While my team was working on scripts for research, scheduling sessions with suppliers, and keeping the project moving in every conceivable way, I had been running my own project: data visualization guidelines.

My work would eventually go on to include elements to be adopted into Wayfair’s design system, but at this stage the ask was to provide guidelines to present to my colleagues, stakeholders in Insights projects, and other interested parties around the company.

I took advantage of some of the resources afforded when you work at a corporation. I expensed textbooks and online courses on data, dashboards, and the history of both print and digital visualizations. I met with colleagues smarter than myself to test my understandings and assumptions.

In the end, while we didn’t get to build out a full data platform for this project, I put together a deck that I used to present my findings to the team and broader stakeholders. I ended up giving the same presentation a handful of times while I was to any relevant team. Below, you’ll find a few selected screens of concepts which would go on to be built into the design system by the Patterns Team, as well as some guidelines we developed for dashboards across Partner Home.

Solutions

This section might be called “launching solutions at a moving target.”

Due to the time and resource constraints of redesigning existing products in a corporate setting with a large number of stakeholders, and conversely the benefits of a well-managed design system, we skipped a large portion of the early iterative mockups that I enjoyed earlier in my career.

While my team was working on our First Visualizations projects, our parent org was shifting gears towards a massive North Star redesign of the whole platform. So, as our product launch was coming together, the ship was turning in a new direction.

Luckily, the intensive prep and research we had done meant that we could launch something useful for our suppliers in a relatively short period of time.

Through research and discovery, we landed on a handful of high-level supplier needs:

• They need one central location where they can see business reports, data, and insights.
• That data will allow them to understand the ROI of working with Wayfair, and allow them to make the right decisions to maximize sales.
• They need the ability to see trends and get insights on how their business is doing on Wayfair so that they can take appropriate actions.
• They need the ability to get Wayfair performance data into their own business intelligence tools so they can see how how Wayfair business is performing relative to other retailers, and get an understanding of their combined portfolio.
• Ease of access to their data, and the ability to compare in their own tools, would be a major aspect of suppliers ability to trust in Wayfair and Partner Home.

Our design approach centered around four key principles, and we kept them in mind during all Insights work:

• Smart: Help suppliers complete tasks with less effort
• Transparent: Make data easily understandable
• Efficient: Focus time on what matters most
• Empowering: Support confident decision-making

Our team planned a phased implementation to both meet our suppliers’ needs, and match our org’s shifting resources:

1. Report Center 1.0 (MVP),
1. This is the “starting point” near the top of this case study. We included basic downloadable reports (Account Overview, Option Drill Down)
2. Quick fixes: Improved report definitions, Excel format options
1. In conversations with suppliers we found elements that they considered broken or confusing. We were able to provide quick fixes by updating labels and simply giving them access to their data in a raw format that they found most useful.
3. North Star Report Center V1: Interactive charts for business performance metrics and access to data
1. These are the screens you’ll find below. We gave suppliers access to the data they had been asking for, and all in one place. We integrated many of the features which had previously been shortcomings in our design.
4. Additional Visualization & Better Navigation: Enhanced reporting capabilities
1. This would be a tangential step as we received new developer resources and had some initial feedback and usage data. We would A/B test along the way, and continue weekly or biweekly sessions with some of our suppliers to track their pain points.
5. North Star Vision: Comprehensive, action-oriented reporting center, including Business Performance over time

Over time, our goal was to build on the baseline we developed, and give suppliers more of what they asked for. We stuck to our Insights principles in developing this robust Business Performance product, which would live within Report Center.

We presented a vision of Report Center which would meet suppliers’ needs, and help them win on Wayfair. As I mentioned above, our team was shifted through layoffs and reorgs, so we left our Product partners with some success metrics to look for over time.

The most clear metric would be retention. Suppliers had the ability to access their raw data and deal with it exactly as they wanted to. If they used our tools and spent time interacting with our visualizations we would have clear indications that suppliers found them useful.

Of course, which tracking usage we would continue to track supplier satisfaction through ongoing surveys and research sessions.

Finally, and the most practical success metric, if suppliers who used our new tools were able to be more successful on Wayfair we would be able to point to their access to timely and comparative data as key to their success.