Design Challenges

2. Outline
● Vendor Gateway Overview
● The Basics
● The Challenges
● Competing Design Concepts
● Situation Analysis
● Methodology
● Usability Results and UX Recommendations
● Solutions
● Final Design
● Lessons Learned

3. Vendor Gateway Overview
● The Lowe's Vendor Gateway is our newest platform, designed to be a single source of truth and ultimate destination for
merchandising Vendors to communicate, collaborate and conduct business with Lowe's.
● Lowe's Vendors who want to partner and prosper with Lowe’s and need simplified access to guided processes, rich
data, and powerful tools that help them engage, manage and grow their business.
● Our team has faced several challenges while establishing the architecture, application integration and unique design.
● This case study is based one such challenge, which resulted in our team making excellent use of the user research
tools that are available to us all.
● There are still several moving pieces related to the Gateway Experience, but this presentation focuses on the User
Access Management piece.

4. The Basics
● Feature Project:
○ Vendor Gateway - User Access Management (UAM) Interface
● The Vendor Gateway Team:
○ Joanna Miles, Senior UX Architect
○ Jaime Brown, UX Architect
○ Matt Lane, Senior UX Researcher
● The Development Team:
○ The Expendables
● Participating Research Vendors:
○ MD Building Products (Stock/Core)
○ Bivona (DropShip)
○ NW Rubber (DropShip)
○ Greenworks (Stock/SOS)
○ Marshalltown (Stock/SOS)
○ Tucker Lumber (Stock/Core)

5. The Challenges
● There were multiple early challenges when the Gateway team started working on the User Access Management
feature.
● The biggest difficulty when starting the UAM projects was a lack of requirement detail and lack of strong
communication with the development team handling the work.
● The UX team presented our design recommendation and received push back from the development team, who had
created their own concept design for providing Vendors access to manage users within the Gateway.
● The development team was unable to provide concrete, definitive reasoning for rejecting the UX recommended design.
● Without solid reasoning for why the UX design recommendation would not work, we were faced with the challenge of
convincing the developers that our choice would present the greatest value to the users.
● Ultimately, we asked: How can the design and the business align to possibly create simplicity in the other buckets while
largely restricting or micromanaging access to required business categories?

6. The Challenges Continued
● Limited Time: This feature was originally scoped before some of us were even brought on to the team. When the of
issue competing interface designs arose, we had less than two weeks to:
○ Identify test objectives
○ Brainstorm usability tasks
○ Create and refine test scripts
○ Design and build a test prototype
○ Recruit vendors for participation
○ Perform the actual testing
○ Review resulting data and form recommendations
● Shifting design input from the business, both before, during and after usability testing was completed.
● Lastly, there was difficulty finalizing key naming conventions and vendor access level requirements for the interface via
the business stakeholders.

7. Competing Design Concepts

8. Situation Analysis
● The first step to solving our challenges was to introduce the idea of user research.
● We reached a point where it was necessary to turn to our users and put forth a quick usability initiative.
● We immediately began brainstorming the most appropriate test methods to solve the immediate question of "which
design would provide the most value?" to our Vendor user group?
● Once the test methodology began to take shape, the Gateway team divided up responsivities and coordinated with our
research contact to schedule Vendors and block off time to complete the testing.

9. Methodology
● Task based activities:
○ The focus was on time and ease of task completion.
○ Were the vendors able to complete the required tasks more easily and efficiently via one concept or the other?
● Tasks:
○ Add new user and set access at the Group Level via both Concept A and Concept B designs.
○ Add a new user and invite them to access the dashboard via design Concept C.
● A/B/C concept rankings:
○ Initially, the test was designed to compare Concept A and Concept B.
○ Business feedback provided during the test design and sessions required the team to make minor updates to
the UX original design concept, resulting in a hybrid design, Concept C.
● Soliciting unfiltered vendor feedback:
○ Top 3 Vendor comments
○ Top 3 Vendor questions

10. Usability Results and UX Recommendations
● Concept A was the winner, but by a very slim margin.
● All three concept designs and accompanying user flows met and even surpassed the minimum requirements of all
vendors, with several vendors noting that the User Access Management application would be top of class and their
personal preference.
● Resulting UX Recommendations:
○ Lowe’s should be careful to avoid complicating the number of buckets and choices by adding huge volumes of
choices to select Vendor access attributes (Amazon according to several vendors is guilty of muddying the
waters.)
○ Finance and legal appeared to be the most vulnerable categories for vendors to give employees access; we
were left asking, "how can design and the business align to possibly create simplicity in the other buckets
while largely restricting or micromanaging access to these categories?"
○ A common theme focused on language. More specifically, Vendors felt we needed to keep the language clear
and easy to understand. Highly important to use common language and not “Lowesify” it—a critique that we
have heard from Vendors across discovery and usability research initiatives since May 2020.

11. Solutions
● Incorporate the Vendor identified positives of the Development team’s design and continue iterating the UX
recommended design, concluding with a hybrid design, Concept C.
● Drive coordination with Project Management and Development earlier in the design process.
● Continue to coordinate with User Research and Business contacts; seek out insights that might otherwise not be
available or easily found.

12. Final Design
● All three designs and the usability and flow surpassed
or met the minimum requirements of all Vendors with
several Vendors noting that this application would be
top of class and their preference.
● The final design contains minor yet key updates,
including collaborating with the development team to
reuse a component that is already in place.
● The business finalized their application categories, and
the design reflects the options of Access and No
Access.

13. Lessons Learned
● Adaptability and flexibility are vital.
○ Each team member involved throughout this process, from start to finish, contributed equally and
enthusiastically.
● Communication makes all the difference.
○ None of this work would have been possible if every member of the team had not spoken out when they had a
question, comment or suggestion.
● When in doubt, turn to your team.
○ The Gateway team has varying levels of research experience, so having Matt Lane provide guidance
throughout the process while also running the Vendors through each of the usability tests was instrumental in
helping us to reach those solutions.
○ There wasn’t much time left in the sprint to get testing accomplished, but we uniformly stood by our request to
incorporate Vendor feedback.
○ We know the value of our users’ input, but this situation allowed us to PROVE the value of that input to the
development team, the business managers, and all our stakeholders.
○ By championing the voice of our users, we were able to put the focus on letting our vendors decide which
design was best able to meet their needs.