Increasing user adoption by boosting administrator confidence in Globality's procurement process
Project overview
The product
Globality is an enterprise-level software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that employs a marketplace approach to sourcing services, with a primary focus on identifying and eliminating procurement-related obstacles. The platform guides users through the procurement process by asking dynamic questions to determine the scope of a service need. The platform then uses AI to source a shortlist of best-fit service providers.
The following case study was created as part of a product marketing demo video showcasing a potential solution for an identified user need.
The problem
Admin-level users expressed concern about inviting their direct reports to use the Globality platform and wanted more control over the suppliers that their employees could select.
The goal
Provide administrator users with confidence that their procurement team can use the platform without direct supervision.
Success metric
Success was measured by tracking the reported confidence of admin-level users.
My role
UX Designer
Responsibilities
Interpret feedback and data, create user stories, personas, storyboards, wireframes and prototypes
Project duration
April 2020–July 2020
Understanding the user
User interviews
For this project, the sales and customer support teams conducted user research by interviewing current platform users and potential clients. Based on these interviews, I found that users had two main pain points when deciding to give their direct reports access to Globality.
Pain point 1: Unapproved spending
Lack of oversight by company administrators allows users to have the ability to procure services without approval.
Pain point 2: Unvetted providers
Users have access to a global pool of providers that may not be appropriately screened by their company administrators.
Meet the user
Defining the persona
Based on the interviews conducted by the sales team and additional demographic and trend data I collected, I developed a goal-directed persona. The target client archetype was a purchasing manager on a busy procurement team who was interested in digitizing their procurement without sacrificing oversight.
Name: Michael
Age: 45
Education: Master’s degree
Occupation: Purchasing manager
Michael is a purchasing manager who needs more oversight on his teams’ procurement activities because he wants to mitigate unapproved spending.
Persona
Primary persona’s goals:
Productivity: Michael wants to make his team more productive by maintaining a single source of truth that will expedite his team’s decision-making process
Control: He wants to feel confident that the suppliers are pre-approved and that institutional knowledge is documented
Balance: He wants to know that suppliers are in good standing without adding to his workload
Primary persona’s frustrations:
Disorganization: There is no single source of truth due to the disorganized use of spreadsheets and other forms of documentation
Lack of oversight: The team uses a large list of suppliers that have not been properly vetted and some suppliers may not fit company standards
Convoluted processes: There is no easy way to cross-reference suppliers with company standards
The design process
Developing guardrails
User research and refinement of the primary persona revealed that admin-level users were motivated by a fear that the use of the Globality platform by their employees could result in unapproved spending with unvetted suppliers due to lack of oversight. To achieve the goal of having more users on the platform and to quell the concerns of the procurement administrator users, the team and I discussed several solutions.
Ultimately, we decided that the best solution was to give the administrators the opportunity to pre-approve suppliers that their employees could easily source. To do this, we created a user flow that asked administrators dynamic questions about their service supplier requirements. This would ultimately allow these users to select a panel of suppliers that were “in-network” for their employees to select from.
Before
All users, including non-administrators, could select from the entire Globality network of suppliers. The lack of oversight of these providers by managers was causing fewer users to log in and use the Globality platform.
After
Company administrators could evaluate providers and designate them as part of an approved panel. The addition of this new flow allowed company administrators to feel a greater sense of oversight.
Going forward
Impact
Administrators for procurement organizations prioritize procurement approvals to get their projects moving. Providing an AI-driven recommendation platform that takes into consideration an administrator's requirements allows them to give their team freedom without worrying about vetting new providers.
This feature was presented to potential clients and resulted in the signing of a multi-million dollar contract, affirming the platform's market viability.
What I learned
This project taught me how to contextualize market research and potential user needs with an application's currently existing functionality.
This project came with partially obscure requirements due to the user research originating from potential clients who were not familiar with the Globality platform. I overcame this challenge by consulting subject matter experts to better understand external user needs and how they could be incorporated into the platform.
Next steps
Develop a process for non-admin users to easily propose new providers.
Provide a way for admin users to compare their pre-approved providers with Globality's suggested providers.