Atlas Copco

A Swedish multinational industrial company that manufactures industrial tools and equipment like drills, screwdrivers. They cater to renowned customers in automotive, aviation and general industries.

Overview

What..

A digital transformation project, with aim to replace legacy purchasing systems for distributors across the globe. The project scope included user research, UX design, UI design and build of a new ecommerce portal ground up, followed by a revamp of the global Atlas Copco website.
Why..

The legacy system was unable to scale up for the modern needs of users. The users needed additional new features which was not feasible in older system. However, there were few features which worked well, and was critical to carry this into the new solution as well.
How..

It was critical to setup a design process, identify user journeys and agree on an MVP scope to pilot the solution, followed by gradual rollout over a period of 3 years. The pilot was released in 10 months and served as a baseline for user testing and gradual scale up.

The Design Problem

The legacy system could not scale up for the increasing needs of customers like ability to cross sell, upsell related products, creating order templates and reorder frequent bulk orders.

The bigger challenge was to change the perception of internal stakeholders who assumed user needs and planned a strategy which was drastically different from user reality!

That’s where I stepped in 😎

The Design Approach

Conduct user interviews

The distributors were the primary user segment for research, wherein I conducted 12 user interviews.

Key insights hinted the reality was that, they were super users, well aware of product portfolio, product specifications, basically, no nonsense users. They had the 10 digit SKU number on their fingertips and only had 7 mins on an avg, to place an order for a customer, with frequent interruptions.

Translate insights to UX strategy

It was clear that the distributors knew what they want, the solution had to be search based, where they can key in the SKU number and add it to cart within few clicks. This also avoids getting into the product pages.

A new feature, Quick order, was introduced as an outcome of research. The purpose of the feature was that a user can copy and paste up to 50 SKUs on the UI, and add all to cart in just 1 click. They can also upload an excel with SKUs, and the system does the rest. We all know how much they love their excel 🥰

The design proposal, as an outcome of user research

Design, test and review

The design proposal was further refined into detailed wireframes and interactive prototypes using Figma. We used this prototype to validate the design with users, and conduct usability test to hear out their thoughts and opinion.

Although the test result was very positive, we identified 2 main parameters that were critical for decision making of Add to cart. Those were, the number of items in stock and their special discounted price. Ofcourse this was added to the designs and taken further in the design process.

Design specification & UI handover

Once the designs were ready for a feature, we handover the UI to the engineers for further refinement & development.

We tried a different approach, by including the engineers, testers and product owner in bi-weekly design reviews, to get their feedback early on in the design process.

This helped the engineers to check the tech feasibility, review the feature interactions as well as forecast the possible dev effort for the feature much earlier. It also served as a great review meeting for designers, to address any tech constraints identified in these discussions

It was fairly clear that the initial assumption that ‘the users are unaware about the products’ was incorrect and the research findings helped to create an informed design roadmap that was search focused rather than exploration.

3 brand portfolio

Key learnings and takeaway

The ambition to bring B2C user experience to B2B is wonderful, however it is important that the experience must be tailored for B2B users.

Making the new system easy to use with new features but also retaining features that worked well in old system and base the design decisions on facts and insights, made this project a great success globally.