PORTFOLIO
Wayfair
B2B Invoicing
Project Overview
Wayfair Professional, designed for businesses like hotels and offices, offers a selection of furniture and decor with exclusive savings. The platform ensures streamlined shopping, fast delivery, and expert support, simplifying the process of furnishing commercial spaces for businesses.
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The objective of this initiative was to redesign Wayfair's business invoices so that they offer clarity, accuracy, and transparency for all parties involved.
My Role:
User Research, Design Lead, Product Designer
Team:
Design (2), Product Management (2), Engineering (3), QA (1)
Timeline:
2020
The Challenge
Wayfair's business customers were drowning in order discrepancies. Reconciling post-order changes was a time-consuming nightmare for both customers and account managers.
Long and unclear invoices, lacking itemized details, left customers baffled about unit prices, discounts, adjustments, and taxes. The B2B team knew they needed a straightforward, future-facing solution.
The Design Process
We applied a double-diamond design approach to facilitate and guide the design process. The process included divergent and convergent thinking stages, emphasizing exploration and refinement.
Research
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Internal Deep Dive:
Delved into Wayfair's own systems, meticulously mapping the invoice creation process.
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Competitive Review:
Scanned the horizon for top performers, both within and outside the industry, capturing their invoice magic.
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User Listening Sessions:
Gave customers and Business Account Managers (BAMs) a platform to air their invoice grievances, gathering firsthand insights.
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Usability Inspection:
Put invoices through a rigorous usability test, uncovering friction points and readability roadblocks.
Inslights gathered
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Invoices did not break out information on an itemized level, making it hard for customers to feel validated that they are being charged the right amounts.
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Payments were not tied to shipments and did not align to the product prices, making customers confused about what they are being charged, when, and why.
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Invoices only reflected the point of sale (POS) and did reflect any
post-order changes, making customers frustrated as they did not have
up-to-date documentation.
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Invoice summary was unclear and did not reflect the order balance, making it difficult for customers to reconcile what the still owe. This drove customers to have to reach out to their BAMs for explanations.
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Invoice Layout and information display was clumsy and hard to parse through, making customers feel that Wayfair was unprofessional and disorganized.
The Design Solution
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Invoices would be live and time-stamped. The order status and payment balance would reflect an up-to-date picture as well as detail when and why post-order changes were made.
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Invoices would be itemized and specify per item the unit price, qty, adjustments/discounts, tax, and subtotal.
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Invoices would group items by shipment and detail the ship location and date.
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Payments would reflect the up-to-date status (pending, settled, void, etc).
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Invoice layout and language/copy would be reorganized and in alignment with the Wayfair pattern library.
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Invoices would be downloadable at any point as PDFs or CSVs and available across devices (including desktop, mobile-web, and native app).
Validation
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Internal Validation: To authenticate our solution, we conducted tests and collected feedback from Business Account Managers (BAMs) and other relevant teams/stakeholders.
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External Validation: We interviewed customers to obtain feedback on the new solution before its launch, and also integrated a feedback prompt for customers post-launch.
The Release
The new solution underwent a trial phase, being implemented on new and/or recent orders (up to 2 weeks back) for B2B customers.
This implementation resulted in an approximately 50% reduction in the time spent on invoice service costs.
Additionally, in a user survey, 76% of respondents who encountered the new solution and were asked about its helpfulness responded with a "Yes"!
But we did not stop there...
Following a successful launch and validation, we expanded access to the new solution to all Wayfair customers, encompassing B2C users across all geographies and LLBs.
We further extended the reach by deploying it to Wayfair's sister sites. This commitment to continuous improvement was fueled by ongoing feedback, which helped us identify areas for refinement, such as enhancing the handling of tax-exempt and negative balance orders.
