IBM Quoting Tool
An application design for Software Quoting, a web-based quoting tool where business partners create, manage and submit quotes of IBM software products. It allows partners to create quotes after registering a deal with IBM or browse IBM’s product catalog directly.
Role
Lead Product Designer
Leading the designs in the end-to-end quoting experience in software quoting tool.
Wireframing | Prototyping | Workshop Facilitator | Stakeholder management | Visual Design
Team
User Researcher
Product owner
Architect
Stakeholders
Engineering team
Overview
What is Partner Guided Selling (PGS)?
Partner guided selling is a legacy web application that allows our partners to add IBM product, create and manage sales quote to sell to third party companies. Partners can offer discounts and the convenience of quick pricing estimates.
Context
After IBM’s Business partner portal has been revamped over the last two years, the stakeholders wanted to modernized other legacy applications within the partner space. The SAP quoting experience was one of the next priority for migration. In partnership with SAP, IBM has utilized their system to create a quoting application for their partners. After 20 years of serving, the leadership team has decided to sunset the lagacy application. This was an opportunity to start from the ground up, involving our design team from the very beginning.
What is the goal?
The goal is to retire the old quoting tool and create a new quoting tool while boosting IBM product sales and increasing new partner enrollment.
Discovery Workshop
Based on the initial research, I conducted a 2-day discovery workshop to understand the user and business needs for this project. We first gathered the list of features and prioritized them based on importance and effort. We conducted a feature prioritization map and created the following.
For MVP, our main features are:
Browse and search a product
Pre-configuration and product configuration
Checkout
Quoting over and submission
My quotes and saved quotes
What did we find?
I conducted a small-scale user interviews to understand their pain points, insights and opportunities with the team. In our initial research, we discovered that:
User Journey Map
On the second day, I drove an ‘as-is’ user journey flow to understand the connection from partner portal (entry) to the new software quoting tool. To gain some insights, I created a prompt to start the conversation.
“I am a new reseller. I need to register a deal in my partner portal, and quickly create a quote to send to my customer”
We found that it was a long and overdrawn process. With this, our team was aligned in reducing these steps by simplifying the process for MVP.
How do we reduce these steps?
Based on the findings in our workshops, I created a to-be user flow that streamline their ways of working based on our MVP feature prioritization list.
In collaboration with our stakeholders, we simplify these steps by introducing a dedicated search and checkout selection experience, which should reduce the processing time.
Competitive Analysis
I also looked at the SaaS and enterprise commerce experience across these competitors. We discovered various approaches that can benefit us such as, utilize software/hardware search filters, checkout experience, and the customer’s end journey.
Google product services
Minimalist visuals
Quick browse to checkout experience
Simple breakdown of available products
Amazon AWS
Well-organized product categories
Utilize advanced search filters
Quick checkout experience
Our goals
01
Establish a purposeful end-to-end experience starting from the foundation.
02
Offer a self-serving experience to the partner, empowering them to navigate and utilize the tool.
03
Eliminate additional steps and automate parts of the experience.
Information Architecture
We received numerous questions from our team and partners on the newly rebuilt flow. I worked with the architect to conduct a card sorting session with three users to validate our assumption. Based on their input, I created a visual board to showcase the new quoting structure. From selecting a product to requesting a quote, it allowed us to streamlined the process and simplified the product selection.
Search, Select, and Quote
Translating the goals above, we wanted to focus on:
Intuitive User Interface
Design a user-friendly and intuitive interface that allows partners to easily navigate and access the information they need.
Streamlined Processes
Enabling partners to perform tasks efficiently without much manual work.
Clear Communication
Foster transparent communication by providing regular updates, notifications, and instructions to keep partners informed.
Design exploration
Based on our insights from our users, prioritized features, and information architecture. I conducted several rounds of validation testing to uncover other use cases that could affect the overall experience. I shared out with our stakeholder and aligned with the rest of the team to communicate our findings and the reasons for our changes. To focus on our goal to streamline the process, I tested two user tasks to identify user feedback and pain points.
1) The navigation from homepage to the cart page (happy path).
2) Search and select a product to configure.
What did users say?
I chose to focus on key metrics such as, Task Completion Rate, time spend on a page, and type of search values they use. I created high-level prototypes to test with our partners. This provided valuable insights into user engagement and task efficiency.
What are we testing:
How long does it take to complete a task
Clarity on main user paths
If our designs aligns with our user’s needs
Gauge user satisfaction
Our research method:
Four group interviews with current business partners, resellers, and distributors.
User feedback on a prototype.
Walkthrough three scenarios based on each user task.
Feedback from our users:
Over 80% agree that the prototype is readable
20/25 users can easily navigate around the site.
It takes half the time for users to request a quote (completion time)
Prototype
Click on the video below to start
By leveraging the IBM’s design system library (Carbon), the 20-year-old legacy tool was modernized to adhere to IBM’s branding style. I focused on he overall visual quality and promptly addressing any usability issues after delivery. I delivered UI specifications to our engineering team and QA any bugs after launch.
I designed a slide-in panel component to adhere to our business requirements for a ‘shopping’ look and feel.
*This was based on IBM’s product pricing component.
01
Its versatile input fields and large data tables is added seamlessly without requiring users to navigate away from the current page.
02
By simplifying the steps to configure a product. It eliminates the process time to ‘checkout’ without the need to restart their selection process.
Final Prototype
Click on video to view final prototype.
Outcome
MVP v1 launched in July 2024. V2 will be released in Q1 2025.
Limitations and Refinements
Due to delivery deadlines, we minimized the functionality for MVP (Phase 1) and released to US partners only for July 2024. For phase 2, we hoped to release more features across the tool and enable more capabilities for users in other regions.
Our initial vision was to automate part of the quoting process by introducing in-app features, so it would eliminate the use of other tools to do their job. Although, we had good intentions, it was way out of scope for MVP with the data set that was given. We decided to transition in these features quarterly in 2025.
Improvements for Phase 2:
- Replace cart page with a ‘mini cart’ component in efforts to reduce additional steps.
- Adding search finder when a user has an opportunity ID
- Weekly cadence with users to flush out part of the user flow
- Retroactive with team and stakeholders