Design task

Simplifying B2B company’s admin panel

Designing a solution for a design task in 24 hours

Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash

Overview

This is documentation of a design task given by Zenatix Solutions for the UI/UX Design Intern position.

Problem Statement

B2B industry has moved online due to the pandemic & people working there face difficulties because of their unfamiliarity with the technology and confusing designs of the online management platforms to manage their transactions, orders, & customers which sometimes end in deal cancellation.

A solution to this problem is to design a user-friendly & easy-to-understand admin panel so that can the employees can easily manage their work with other businesses.

Primary Research

I wasn’t much familiar with the B2B industry and its operations. To give this case study a good shape and to design a better solution, I decided to go with understanding the B2B business, their operations, challenges, & factors affecting them. Also, the most important thing was to know the situation of the B2B industry after moving online due to the pandemic and how are they doing now in terms of order placements, customer retention, & profit-making.

Understanding B2B

What is a B2B company?
B2B means business-to-business. A B2B company is a company which sells their products and provides services to the other business to help them grow in the market. Think of it as a business between two businesses.
Some examples of B2B companies are WeWork (provides office spaces for other businesses and individuals to work), Slack (a business communication platform), MailChimp (the world’s largest marketing automation platform).

Who is B2B's target audience?
B2B company targets other businesses which can be a B2C (business-to-consumer) company or any other business type company.

Factors affecting B2B

• Businesses will likely stick to a product or service they trust which is built by providing quality products and services that will last longer and will help in creating a better brand identity for the business.
• Businesses want it to be simple and easy by seeing only the necessary products and services instead of bombarding all the varieties which make businesses confused in product and service selection.
• Create results they can see because businesses are run with the mindset of return on investment (ROI) which means that the average business procuring your services or purchasing your products needs to see results in order to buy into your brand. They don’t want to simply pay and hope it works.
• Relationships are important in B2B marketing because businesses are likely to stick to a product or service provider which they already know and trust. A relationship is built over time between the seller and the buyer and trust are established which means that retaining your B2B customers relies on maintaining that relationship and ensuring the relationship you have with your customer is cared for with excellent customer support.

Situation of B2B due to pandemic

New digital reality
Earlier, B2B buyers and sellers used to prefer face-to-interaction for their deals with other businesses. Due to the pandemic, B2B has gone digital where remote interactions made their business run even more smoothly. Only about 20 percent of B2B buyers say they hope to return to in-person sales, even in sectors where field-sales models have traditionally dominated, such as pharma and medical products.

Data by McKinsey & Company

Customers are buying big online
B2B has seen the power of moving online and comfort B2B buyers display in making large new purchases and reorders online. It used to be that e-commerce was mainly for smaller-ticket items and fast-moving parts, not so anymore. 70 percent of B2B decision-makers say they are open to making new, fully self-serve, or remote purchases in excess of $50,000, and 27 percent would spend more than $500,000.

Data by McKinsey & Company

Secondary Research

I decided to go with secondary research to know what challenges are being faced by the B2B companies. Google helped me a lot in this.

Defining internal and external users

• Internal users are the ones working inside a B2B company that sells, manages, and keeps track of deals, orders, & transactions with other businesses.
• External users are the individuals/businesses buying the product or services from a B2B company.

Challenges faced in a B2B

• Keeping constant track of return on investment (ROI)
• Integration with technology
• Technology seems like a robotic system
• Difficult to understand the menus and options on a website for a non-tech person
• Tools aren’t right or easily accessible
• Managing all the customers, content, orders, requests, transactions, reports, etc. on a single platform
• Customizing content for each stage of the buyer’s journey (real-time status update)
• Growing market share
• Customer loyalty and retention
• Long & complex buying cycles
• Not multiple payment methods for the buyers
• Not knowing clearly about the new/clear customer agreements & contracts
• Can’t find the products and place orders quickly

Research Insights

• 💹 B2B industry is growing at a very high rate and generating billions of dollars of annual revenue worldwide (collectively & cumulatively) because businesses shifted online due to the pandemic.
• 💲 Customers (buyer businesses) are buying are in large amounts as they themselves are increasing their inventories to increase their revenue as well.
• 😖 Not able to get comfortable with the design & technology is the major issue that acts as a barrier and results in canceling of deals.
• ⚙ Lack of a single management platform built according to user’s (internal & external both) requirements and understandings to manage everything quickly in one place.

Competitor Analysis & Inspirations

In order to design a better and usable admin panel, I saw some famous companies’ & some startups’ admin panels/systems to know how they have designed it for their employees.
Competitor analysis helped me a lot to understand how other companies are operating & what features they have which we can use in our design as per requirements.

Alibaba

Alibaba is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in e-commerce, retail, Internet, and technology. It is also known as the Amazon of China.

Amazon

Amazon Inc. is an American multinational technology company based in Seattle, Washington, which focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence.

Odin (Wheelseye)

Odin is a logistics management platform built by Wheelseye, a Gurugram based startup. They partner with hundreds of thousands of businesses across India in the shared journey of building reliable, safer, and predictable transportation infrastructure.

Salesforce

Salesforce Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management service and also provides a complementary suite of enterprise applications focused on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development.

✨ Random design inspirations

I went to Pinterest to get some user interface inspirations & to get some aesthetic ideas.

Source: Pinterest

Dashboard, finally! 🎉

Based on the primary and secondary research, many screens were decided to go with such dashboard, products, services, orders, customers, transactions, logistics, analytics, & settings.

Here, I decided to go with two screens i.e. customers (which are users according to the task) & analytics.

Customer

The customers' screen was designed in such a way so that it becomes easy for the admin to navigate through the option and clearly see the customer information in a list view. The right area of the screen is reserved to give some insights about the customers such as top customers & most liked products and services by the customers.

Analytics

Analytics screen is designed based on the latest updates in the company which gets updated in real-time. Admin can even import the analytic report (excel files and JSON format) and can also export the report as per the need and file type. The right area of the screen is reserved for the artificial intelligence-generated insights which are based on current analytics and these AI-generated insights act as a companies performance indicators and they also recommend rights and wrongs being done in the company by tracking the activities.

Design Failures & Learnings

Why this design could fail?

The major reason due to which I feel that this admin panel design could fail is that some non-tech people working in a B2B company can find it difficult to read the graphs, charts, & other visualized stats which may result in decreasing their overall user experience of using the admin panel. This is because I myself have an engineering background so I can easily read the analytical reports in the form of graphs, charts, & other visualizations but it is different in the case of a non-engineering background person or the person who doesn’t have knowledge about these concepts and they may not be able to decipher them easily.

Learning

• This was my first design task for UI/UX Design Intern position, I learned how to do research, ideation, brainstorming, & design fast considering the time constraints & giving my best to complete the task in time.
• Experience to design a large-scale admin panel which creates a huge impact on the business’s performance and also affects their revenue model operations.