Reduced initial time for onboarding by 58% and cut abandonment rates by 50%.
My Role & Responsibilities
I managed a team of 4 designers, assigning areas of work and expected outcomes. I lead and facilitated cross functional collaboration to ensure feasibility and delivery. I was also hands on through the project, conducting interviews, working through the experience mapping, creating and testing wireframes, and final visual design.
Context & Problem
The onboarding experience was difficult and confusing causing a 37% abandonment rate. Those that completed onboarding took an average of 42 days.
The Work
- Supplier Interviews for qualitative data
- Journey and Experience Mapping
- Wireframes and Workflows
- Visual Design and Screens
Outcome & Results
New suppliers completed onboarding 58% faster and the abandonment rate dropped to 18%. Reduced customer support needs by 80 hours per week, 2 FTE reduction.
The Problem
The onboarding experience for suppliers was complex, fragmented and confusing. It was a mix of self service and associate supported without useful tracking or visibility to the process. When we looked at the metric we learned this complexity and friction caused a huge abandonment rate from protential suppliers and those that stuck around through the process took over 40 days to get onboarded.
The Work
The team went through different levels of research to ensure we were targeting the right areas to improve.
- Identified previous research that provided insights that were relevant to the issues with onboarding.
- Interviewed Suppliers that had just completed onboarding for qualitative feedback on their experiences to understand pain points.
- Interviewed potential Suppliers to understand their expectations and learn from experiences they had with competitor onboarding flows.
Experience Maps and Archetypes
To communicate how the new experience would come to life to other teams and to ground the teams understanding, the team created archetypes and and Experience Map to show where the experiences overlapped or diverged and how the design addresses the pain points and goals.
Wireframes and Workflows
Understanding the Supplier Journey and the archetypes lead into creating wireframes and flows for the experience.
As the flows were developed, low fidelity prototypes were quickly produced to get feedback from Suppliers through the process.
Visual Design and Screens
The final step was bringing Wayfair’s Design System to life in the flows. Supplier Onboarding had a number of new patterns and components that were added to the Design System for future teams to leverage.
Outcome & Results
Launching the new experience made it much easier and faster to get through large parts of the flow. Signing contracts, Insurance, and setting up payments, all happen in minutes through self-service and improved automation. Suppliers reported feeling in control of the process and found the new flows easy to work through.
- Reduction in time to onboard with Wayfair by 20 days or 58%.
- Cut abandonment rates in half from 37% to 18%
- Reduced associate hours to support Supplier Onboarding by 80 hours per week
Hindsight & Reflections
If given the chance to work through this project again my main change would be how the teams were structured and how we collaborated. There were teams that were outside of our direct organization that had very different priorities and delivery schedules and we depended on their support. It made it very difficult to effect change in one the areas that was identified as the most troublesome through our research.