Product Design

Vendor Onboarding

I led the UX for Groupon goods vendor onboarding platform workflows. My goal was to find design opportunities to conceptualize, test, and pitch for the vendor onboarding Platform to reduce the onboarding timeline.

My Role

UX/UI Designer

I was the sole designer and led design for the entire lifecycle of the product.

Project Duration

Shipped MVP in 3 months

Rolled out over 15+ feature enhancements after launch

Team Size

1 Designer

1 UX Researcher

Project Overview & Problem

Groupon wants to revamp its current merchant Goods gateway onboarding system.

The current system is partially online. Groupon wants to create a 100% online self-service onboarding platform with a better user experience with competitive features, an intuitive, modern user interface, and updated design systems.

The current vendor onboarding time takes 2-3 weeks. Businesses want to reduce this timeline.

Business Goal

My UX Approach

DISCOVERY

Partnered with UX resesrcher and conducted 1:1 user interviews with existing vendors and internal onboarding team to understand their pain-points, task and expectations.

I facilitated a discovery workshop with product, marketing, and dev. The goal was to understand the existing system deeply and identify key behaviors, barriers, and area of improvemnents.

UX Interviews

We conducted a user study with 12+ vendors, including large-scale vendors(GSOR), small-scale vendors (SSOR), and Groupon internal onboarding team members (Internal), to understand their onboarding experiences, daily task and expectations.

Merchants (External Users)

Type of merchants
Merchant goals
Merchant’s current system onboarding experience
Pain points during their onboarding
Merchant expectations
other platforms which merchants using to sell their items

Groupon Internal gateway team (Internal Users)

Role, responsibilities, and daily tasks
Team and individual goals
Onboarding support
Current system and Painponts.
Team and Individual expectations
Onboarding Tickets handling
User/data verification and approvals.

User Persona

Based on user interviews, created personas and their daily task flows.

Heuristic Analysis

The next step in my process was to do a heuristics analysis of the current onboarding flow. There are 10-point lists, but only six major points seemed the most appropriate for analyzing tasks run on from sections of the existing gateway system.

Old onboarding Forms

Scenario: The user finds some products to sell online with his own fulfillment during the holiday season. He picks up a laptop, opens the Groupon website, and tries to understand how to sell products using the Groupon gateway, registering as a Third-Party merchant.

Analysis Task: Use Groupon to sell his/her product as early as possible this holiday season. I’m curious to see what happens.

At the end of Heuristic research, Presented all positive and negative findings list with recommendations to the business.

Findings and Recommendations

User Journey

Competitors Analysis

Here are two type of competitors in e-commerce & retail industry.

Direct Competitors:

In-Direct Competitors:

UX Proposals

User Flows

Existing User Flows

New User Flows

New Individual Flows

Concept Design

Once the user flows and scenarios were clear I used my most trusted skill, white boarding/sketching, to bring to life the ideas I had in my mind. I used all the information I gathered from the UX exercises into the sketches.

I created two design approaches and presented to business with pros and cons metric data’s for further narrow down.

Business agreed to go with interactive form based based approach on cost and time constraints.

Resource Page for Vendors

Based on competitor research, I proposed a business for a starting page for merchants to understand the Groupon selling process, benefits, and guidance with marketing content. Based on this, I collaborated with the marketing team, product manager, and respective functional SMEs to create a Merchant onboarding starting page.

Design Iteration

Each and every page concept design presented to business and iterated based on feedback and A/B testing.

Final Designs

Vendor User ID creation

Vendor Welcome Page

Vendor Phone Verification

Vendor Store Address Verification (Stage-1)

Vendor Tax Account Creation

Vendor Tax Existing Account Link

Vendor Profile Review and Submit

Vendor Address Verification (Stage-2)

Vendor Profile Page

Updated Design Systems

Adapt and Scale it further using the Groupon Mixer design system. The design system helps UI developers create templates that are pixel-perfect.

MSAT Survey – To Get User Feedback

Design Review – Tool Committee Approval

Partnering with the project manager and business analyst, we created a business presentation document along with the points below for discussion.

Requirements
User research findings
Overall UX strategy plan
User flows
Feature list with pros and cons
User Testing results
Clickable rapid prototype link.

Participants: Project Manager, Business analist, User researcher, Product designer and Business Tool committee members

Challenges and Milestones

Primary and secondary research and data gathering with large external merchants and internal business group.
Understanding existing merchants onboarding flow within short period.
Interacting with multi geographic team to run each UX flow and sign off.
Feasibility UI checks with front and back-end engineers in every stage of the design process.
Quantitative feedback survey – both internal and external users.
User Lab testing (Different Time Zone) – Merchants all over the world.
The business Tool committee reviewed and signed off (Gathering large group internationally).
Handling Multiple projects with different product owners (Gateway, Dashboards (Merchant and Wavefront), PO cutting Merge, and survey system)

Success

onboarding Processing Time – Reduced onboarding time days to hours (80% based on pre and post-launch survey test)
Complexity – Simplify onboarding flow with a user progress bar and user save and continue option.
Simplified bank/payment and Avalara account linkage with advanced API integration.
New features – Added online phone/address verification, Merchant dashboard, new marketing pages
Updated new design system.
Easy Maintenance – Eliminated internal user onboarding support by adding a tips and notes section on each page.
Adding a welcome page with a legal and agreement option reduced the Vendor dropout rate by 56% overall.

Testmonial

Matthew Hanson

Groupon Design Director

I brought Ravi in to help us transition the UX of a complex inventory management system from an internal tool to a user-friendly self-service platform for 3rd party merchants.

Ravi did an amazing job with all these complex challenges working with partners across multiple geographies/timezones while keeping the various sub-projects on schedule while engaging with multiple partner and stakeholder teams while working remotely.

Ravi not only delivered on the requirements of these efforts but pushed the teams to consider best practice approaches while offering multiple solutions to our UX challenges framed as clear and easy-to-understand tradeoffs.

Ravi is a self-starter with solid instincts and was able to get up to speed very quickly.

Kavitha Kochar

Product Owner – Groupon Goods

Ravi was our assigned Designer on the Vendor portal for Groupon Goods when he was at Cognizant.

I got a chance to work closely with him for over 8 months across a number of initiatives. Throughout my interactions, I would find him centered around the end customers (vendors and sellers in our case) through his line of questioning around the use cases.

He would be thoughtful about various nuances of workflows and would be sure to present a few different alternatives with supported rationale for each of them.

At the same time, I found him collaborative and open to my ideas which would lead to several discussions with the goal to design the best experience that took all considerations into account.