Product Registration
Streamlining data collection for Fair Trade products.
Overview
Fair Trade works to empower producers, industry, and brands to ensure that the people making Fair Trade Certified goods are working in safe conditions, protecting the environment, building sustainable livelihoods, and earning additional money to empower and uplift their communities.
Practically, this means that organizations throughout a supply chain are audited against a set of standards and can show the Fair Trade seal on their products if they meet these standards. One of the many supporting functions in this complex system is getting organizations to register their products with Fair Trade.
Understanding the Problem
At the time, Fair Trade’s partners would register their products and artwork by emailing a spreadsheet of data points and art files to an account manager. This process was labor-intensive, did not scale, and resulted in data being siloed in various people’s inboxes and on computers. As a result, it was nearly impossible to get an accurate understanding of how many and what type of products were in the Fair Trade ecosystem and leverage that data in any way.
My Role
As a User Experience Designer, I led and collaborated on every step of this new app’s development including research and synthesis, prototyping and iterating, interaction and visual design, and usability testing.
Solution
We launched an online experience that allowed Fair Trade business partners across four product verticals (consumer packaged goods, seafood, coffee, and produce) to provide up-to-date product information, upload packaging artwork, review feedback on registration issues, and edit product information through a web app in our Partner Portal.
Research
Discovery
My first step was to explore the current landscape to uncover the existing processes and information that were required to complete this process.
An early constraint of this project was building trust within the organization. While Fair Trade is a 20 year old organization, the tech team was only a few years old at the time. A large part of our work was helping the organization understand the value and process of product development while we were also doing it.
As a result, many traditional design activities, like speaking directly to users, were unfamiliar to the organization and very difficult to enact. So I did the best I could at understanding the user by speaking with stakeholders, reviewing documents, and looking at industry competitors, and organizations that dealt in data-heavy processes.
Key Findings
After synthesizing what I learned from the research, there were some key observations and opportunities that emerged that were important to center our work around as we moved forward.
Additionally, two major personas surfaced across the four product verticals.
Exploration
Information Architecture
A critical part of product registration was collecting the right data from the user. But the challenge lie in understanding what type of product (e.g. cookie vs. orange vs. cocoa) the user needed to register so that we could ask for the right data.
I had to triangulate where the product was in the Fair Trade taxonomy, if it had ingredients, and if it was a consumer-facing or wholesale product.
It came down to asking some qualifying questions at the beginning of the process so that we could present the correct form.
Iterating
Building a new application takes a colossal amount of iterations to get right. Not only that but there were any different part of the app that we had to get right:
Overall user flow
Product registration form
Artwork management
Feedback cycle and internal tools
Below are examples of iterations taken to work through building out the entire application.
Outcome
Testing & Adapting
After close to a year of work, the tech team had gained enough trust within the organization to speak with users. I conducted usability testing with folks at 6 different organizations to make sure what we were planning on launching met their needs.
It was a stressful moment in the process as this was the first time we were speaking with users about this specific problem space. But the reception of the user test was overwhelmingly positive. A lot of my assumptions and work was validated but, as always, I learned a lot in these sessions:
There was confusion about terms we used and the help text wasn’t always helpful
Some data isn’t known at the time of registration so certain fields can’t be required
Folks were expecting to enter data we didn’t ask for
Folks typically register products when they feel all their materials are ready, so there wasn’t a need for saving drafts
Measuring Success
A few months later, we successfully launched to 1,000+ partners across 4 product categories, and to date, about 17,000 products have been registered.
Business partners shared that it was easier to work with this tool than spreadsheets and they didn't have to store those Excel files separately on their system. It made things quicker, all in one place, and the speed of product approval time increased.
Learnings
Never assume that creating for the most complicated use cases will also create solutions for less complicated ones.
Make sure to leave space for designing internal tools alongside their externally facing counterparts to avoid user experience gaps.
Push for standardization in business processes where possible.
Advocate for phased design and rollout on large products to avoid the waterfall trap.