Grainger Pricing Model Pilot Program
ROLE:
Lead UX Architect on UX Special Projects Team - a small, focused group tasked with educating and promoting the benefits of working with the UX team to non-ecommerce Grainger business units, with the goal of improving their internal applications and processes.
CLIENT PROBLEM
The Pricing Team was running a small Chicago-based pilot for a new pricing and incentive model geared towards Grainger’s Small Market customers. This team had developed their own web application to support the small pilot sales team.
However as the pilot program was slated to grow and expand into 10 other markets, the Pricing Team wasn’t confident that the current application could support the demand or was meeting the needs of the sales teams and customers they intended to support. They enlisted the services of the UX Special Projects Team to:
⁃ Evaluate the usability of the current application
⁃ Work with the sales team to determine if the functionality met their needs
⁃ Re-develop the application platform to be scalable and meet demand
SOLUTION APPROACH
Before the Special Projects Team could start our work, we had to learn about the Pricing and Incentive Models. We attended seminars conducted by the Pricing Team and learned how Grainger developed pricing based on customer spend and how product category incentives could be applied.
We then went to work on evaluating the existing application. We completed a full usability evaluation, identifying critical problems with information hierarchy, messaging, flow and functionality. We also evaluated the back-end code base, database connections and server setup and determined that for the application to scale and handle future demand, it should be rebuilt.
We conducted in-person rapid-prototyping work sessions using simple paper prototypes and whiteboard sketches with the project sponsor to get immediate feedback on information and functional priority. We then developed a functional prototype in Axure that we used to conduct remote and in-person usability tests with the current pilot sales team.
As part of this research exercise, we also wanted to find out how the application fit into the sales process and how the sales people used it. We learned about the type of equipment the sales team uses, where they use it, what type of connection speed they have while working in the field and what their immediate need is when on-site versus what information can be completed later back in the office. This information greatly influenced the UI redesign of the application as taking screen size, connection speed and usage location were now priorities.
The last part of the redesign effort had the UX development team working with the Pricing Team developers on development best practices, release planning and identifying server environments stable enough to handle the application.
Original Application
Working Prototype
Redesigned Application
RESULTS
Using an iterative approach during prototyping, design and development, the Pricing Team saw continual progress over the duration of the project and was able to provide feedback every step of the way. Working iteratively also allowed the Special Projects Team to stay on track, prioritizing core features and functions and backlogging non-critical enhancements for post-launch releases.
The entire Special Projects Team and Pricing Team participated in Functional and User Acceptance Testing which ensured every member of the team knew how the updated application worked.
The updated application launched on-time and was released to the Chicago pilot sales team for additional field testing. The sales team was thrilled that the updated application displayed better on their small devices, prioritized the information they needed in the field and worked better on their remote connections.
When the pilot market expansion happened a month later, the updated application supported the demand.
