Design System
I created & launched Ingram Micro’s first Design System with my team of UX designers and UI developers.
Being a global leader in technology distribution with a variety of small business and enterprise customers, Ingram Micro’s UX needs are very different from a more traditional B2C or B2B company.
Therefore, our team had to empathize with many different audiences and stakeholders when defining core design principles and working with the entire global engineering organization to develop and enhance this resource that is now used across the entire company.
Performing UX Research in B2B2B
distribution is unlike any other business
What I learned from working in a (technology) distribution business is that there’s no such thing as a “customer”, instead you do business and interact with many different stakeholders within the supply chain: from resellers to vendors to end-users. All of whom are your customers. They are many different people and businesses with unique needs and goals and usually have little in common other than a relationship with you.
Early Start
Performing extensive UX Research early on enabled me to understand the intricacies and specifics of these relationships. I spent the first months on the job traveling around the country and talking to resellers, end-users, vendors as well as our internal associates. It helped me better understand their needs, motivations and how they were conducting business on a daily basis.
Lights, camera, action
Knowing the value of these conversations, observations and interactions, I wouldn’t hesitate to bring my camera, tripods and mics so I could document these encounters and share lessons from them long after they’d ended. Those insights have proven to be incredibly valuable when designing products and making strategic decisions on the direction of a product.
Documenting & Organizing
Some of the greatest challenges of UX Research are managing the large amounts of data, dissecting signals from the noise and turning those signals into actionable goals & objectives.
Over time, as I built an extensive library of customer testimonials and data, I had the foresight to neatly organize and categorize the data so it would be re-usable in the future. This allowed me to quickly retrieve and analyze relevant customer feedback at the time it was needed, whether for an executive presentation or for educational purposes.
Knowing your customer = Innovation
In addition to these valuable insights into customer behavior and needs, spending significant amounts of time with customers provided me with many ideas on how we could better engage with them, how to improve their experience, which led to the launch of new, innovative products.
Understanding the customer is key in any role and organization, but in this case it provided a deep understanding of the intricacies of a multi-level supply chain. My curiosity to learn new things led me to uncover the world of B2B2B and it’s unique design challenges.
UX Benchmarking
How do we measure UX results? I’ve been able to quantify results by setting a baseline of UX metrics like ease of use, breadth of capabilities and overall user experience. These metrics can then be tied into the overall customer journey and compared with competitors or industry leaders.
Questions like “How does our customer on-boarding stack up against our competitors?” can be broken down in more measurable metrics like amount of time it takes for a user to sign up for services, the number of clicks, or the number and severity of potential errors throughout the process. Instilling benchmarking as part of the overall design process allowed me and my team to become more results oriented and focus on enhancements with the greatest impact to the customer experience.
Global e-Commerce Redesign
I currently lead the team responsible for creating the UX/UI for the entire global e-Commerce organization. When I joined Ingram Micro’s Innovation Lab as the first UX Designer, I immediately realized there was an immense opportunity: our e-Commerce experience generating billions of dollars in revenue was sub-par and had fallen behind industry standards, best practices and our competition.
In part due to my early UX research, which was extensively used in presentations to executives and CEO, the global leadership team was convinced to take action and launched a comprehensive digital transformation which put a lot of emphasis on improving our digital products. This change enabled me to grow my team and build Ingram Micro’s first product design team responsible for our most critical digital products.
Some other accomplishments:
Led design & product management for industry’s first IoT marketplace, resulting in $65m sales within the first 12 months. Concept to launch in 4 months and still growing.
Led the design for Cisco Partner Portal, a quote and order management tool enabling high-complexity enterprise-grade capabilities for SMB and mid-tier markets through an easy-to-use and intuitive user experience. Rated #1 quote & order management tool by customers, scoring higher than any of the competitors. Concept to launch in 90 days.
Reduced development time by up to 50% through implementation of design best practices into the SDLC (ie. established processes for user testing, data-driven design, prototyping, created company-wide style guide and build a customer testimonial library).
Built a team that delivered industry-leading B2B e-commerce experiences to our 200,000+ global customers, supported 20+ product domains in bringing their products to life, managed team of UX/Product Designers, Researchers and UI developers.
Other Projects:
