Wayfair
PO Visibility Search History
Duration
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February-April.2023
My Role
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Product Design Intern
Team
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WFDN-Transportation XD
Introduction
It has been a great experience working with my team on several projects during my 6-month internship journey at Wayfair.
I was so glad to be the product design intern on the WFDN team. Our team focuses on designing global internal platforms and products related to the process of the transportation, storage, fulfillment, and delivery of customer orders.
I had a fantastic experience working on various projects with different team members and stakeholders from January to June 2023. My responsibility was to help the team improve the user experience and design system for Wayfair's internal platforms.
Project Context
👷 What is PO Visibility?
Wayfair's Transportation Specialist/Supervisor, EMTs, and Warehouse Supervisor use PO Visibility in our internal platform called 4Sight to enable them to track and investigate customers' product orders, providing the necessary information for their daily operations.
🔎 What does the current situation of the PO Visibility search function look like?
PO Visibility has a basic search function that allows users to search for POs and cartons by typing the PO/Carton number in the search bar.
🤔 How to enhance this search function to help users quickly find the product orders they’ve searched before, and back to it?
Our team decided to provide a PO Visibility Search History feature to guide users back to the specific product order they've searched before, which could improve the user experience of the search function.
Meanwhile, it is also one of the key features for stage 3 of our 4Sight internal platform and was planned to launch in Q2.
I was so lucky to be assigned to design this PO Visibility Search History feature, which was my first big challenge during my intern journey!
The Solution
Provide clean and straightforward search history with useful information that users want to have on the PO Visibility landing page in the internal platform 4Sight to help users quickly back to the specific product order items they've searched recently.
How did I get to this final solution？
Problems
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What do users really want if they want to have a search history in PO Visibility?
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What is the data point that can help users to recall what they’ve searched for?
Goals
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Identify and determine the data point displayed in the search history feature
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Design a straightforward way to leverage those data points and help users quickly back to what they've searched for previously
Design Process
Discovery & Define
How I finalized the feature requirements based on user interviews
The efficient way to find "answers" to solve the problems of this project is to understand user needs and expectations towards search history. To find out what data points are necessary and useful to display in search history that can help users quickly back to what they've searched before.
So, I conducted 1:1 interviews with Transportation Specialists/Supervisors, EMTs, and Warehouse Supervisors to see what data points/information users want to have in the search history box.
Thanks to my interviewers for giving me lots of insight and showing their expectations toward PO Visibility search history, which allows me to summarize and prioritize data points required in the search history section. Then, I presented my findings and summary to PM and my mentor, and we finalized the feature requirements for this search history.
Ideation & Design
It's important to gain feedback and improve designs
To gain the support we need from users, PM, and engineering teams, I always ask myself "Why is this design better than the alternative?" I can have a rationale to prove that the final design is the best solution. Of course, all of the final solutions have gone through numerous iterations, which is a repetition process of receiving feedback and doing iterations.
Gain feedback from design team and users
During that process, I really enjoyed doing design critic with teams that can receive lots of insight and feedback from other experienced designers.
Plus, I was so curious about how my users feel toward my designs, does my design meet their expectations? After showing the design to the team and users, I also got some feedback to iterate my design.
Sync & Deliver
Gain feedback from the engineering team and did trade-off
The most important thing is to sync and align with the engineering team before the product move to the development stage. Understanding constraints and listening to their feedback could help me to perfect my designs and also try to reduce the engineering team's development time. I've been always learning how to trade off the final solutions between design and development.
I was so glad the engineering team gave me some insights, letting me think more about other factors and edge user cases. Then I was thinking of iterating again to come up with another new version.
The feedback I got from the engineering team inspired me to think about "Can I design alternatives that are better than this current version in the limited time?". So I discussed it with my mentor and researched other related features in this internal platform. Then, I came up with a brand new version that is easy for users to use as well can reduce implementation time for the engineering team.
Instead of listing search history items in the drop-down box, I displayed all the history items by using a similar card design that is used in other products on the same platform. This allows developers to revise the existing set of code instead of writing a new one, reducing their development time.
Final Design
After another round of iteration, I got positive feedback from the engineering team. As the designer, it's the relief time to hear " Looks perfect!" from developers which means I hand off my final designs successfully and got support from the engineering team.
I was so glad this search history feature in PO visibility has been launched! I was so happy to see it go live before the end of my internship 🎉
Reflection
🤔 Broader design thinking based on different user cases
When I assigned this project to design the search history, the dropdown design framework jumped into my mind because it's the common design for the search history. But for our user case, the internal platform needs to display more information than on the 2C website as usual. So it's important to open my mind and break the traditional concepts if needed, which can help me come up with more efficient designs.
👨💻 Learn how to communicate and collaborate with engineers
For entry-level designers, we always pay more attention to designs, thinking more about how to solve users' problems. But we also should think about the implementation and development by standing on the engineers' side, understanding constraints and limitations. If our designs can be easy for users to use as well as not difficult for the engineering team to develop, the team and the company can reduce implementation time and cost.
✨ Enjoy Every Moment and Embrace the Adventure
I encountered a big layoff and re-org during my intern journey. And I lost my manager and had a new mentor and manager at that time. But I was so lucky that all the people in my team help me a lot, inspired me a lot that I learned a lot from them as well.
Even though there was an unexpected change, I was learning to stay optimistic and keep going! Job and life can go with challenges and changes, learning how to turn from the “upset” to the “positive”. Enjoy every moment of my work, my projects, and my designs. Finally, there will be a lot of meaningful gains in the end.
Thanks to all the people for your help, support, and encouragement at Wayfair, I'll take those reflections and keep going to my next adventure!
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