In the past, Lowe's faced a challenge in the lack of a centralized, digital platform for managing vendors. This resulted in negative impacts on various aspects of the business, such as vendor onboarding, communication and inventory management. The UX team was tasked with creating a unified solution that streamlined vendor interactions with Lowe's and addressed pain points to improve the vendor experience. My role in this project was to design a seamless user experience within technical constraints and to create high-fidelity wireframes that aligned with Lowe's business model. The MVP was successfully launched and additional features were added to further benefit vendors. The effort was also focused on creating a holistic and intuitive platform for vendors to interact with Lowe's, which can be accessed through a one-stop-shop, thus reducing the need for vendors to use multiple systems and applications. This was done by engaging with product, business and engineering teams, along with UX team of researchers, content strategists and UX architects, to bring this vision to life.
“Having a roadmap for how I should conduct business with Lowe’s would be highly beneficial for our company. We value our relationship with Lowe’s and seek to grow our business, and if Lowe’s can make that easier for us, it would put them above their competitors”
The set of high-fidelity wireframes presented are of the MVP experience for the Vendor Gateway, including a step-by-step guide for onboarding with Lowe's. My responsibility in this project was to collaborate with the product and business teams to gather the necessary requirements for the application, including the onboarding process, and work with the engineering team to ensure its technical feasibility. Through a design review process and continuous iteration, we were able to create the most optimal user experience for Lowe's vendors, within the technical constraints of the initial effort.
The next feature that was added to the Vendor Gateway gave vendors the ability to manage their own users within their companies within the Gateway. I created high-fidelity wireframes for this feature, which allowed the administrator to view a list of users and the applications within the Gateway that they had access to. This feature included several user flows such as the ability to invite new users, manage access to applications, reset passwords, and remove users from the Gateway.
We added a third feature that enabled vendors to create a ticket for any issues they encountered while conducting business with Lowe's. To implement this feature, we reused the same page layout and repurposed the UI elements to support a message center functionality. This message center was considered an MVP and we continued to enhance it based on feedback and user needs.
