Work

Walmart Labs

Agreement Management, end to end

Walmart Agreement Management: the lifecycle of supplier agreements — onboarding, contracts, renewals — rebuilt from beta after six phases of research, and launched to 5,000 users at NPS 67.

The Agreement Management Application

Impact

67
NPS
6.2/7
Ease of use
6.3/7
Average satisfaction
5,000
Users at launch

Case snapshot

Role
Product Designer · Research through testing
Scope
15 user types, 8 connected applications
Parties
Buyers, suppliers, finance and legal
Timeline
January 2019 – launch 8 October 2020

The situation

A beta was live, and nobody knew which of its problems were the expensive ones.

Walmart’s legal agreement process with its suppliers was conceived and built for a world that predated omnichannel retail. Walmart Enterprise set out to redesign it as modular agreements that address the key pains and support omnichannel retail — and the new contract model needed a new application to power it.

The Agreement Management Application manages that lifecycle: searching and onboarding existing suppliers, inviting new ones, retrieving supplier contracts, creating and renewing agreements, and holding contextual conversations with everyone involved in an agreement, finance and legal included.

This project’s brief: identify the usability issues in the beta release, and decide which features were critical to prioritise for the next iteration.

What made it hard

  1. Ambiguity

    Users could not tell what state an agreement was in, or what was expected of them next.

  2. Slow processes

    A long, manual process with too many cycles between buyers, suppliers and support.

  3. No traceability

    Tracking was limited where it existed at all — hard to know where the ball was.

  4. Too much information

    Suppliers were overwhelmed by the amount of information and Walmart-specific jargon.

My scope

Research, interaction, visual, prototyping and testing — on a system wired to eight others.

What I owned
User research, interaction design, visual design, prototyping and testing — user interviews, personas, site maps, competitive research, wireframes, high-fidelity design and prototype, and design specifications.
The surface area
AMA serves 15 distinct user types and talks to 8 different applications. Every flow had to hold for a supplier onboarding themselves, a buyer chasing progress, and the finance and legal functions attached to the agreement.
Who I worked with
Stakeholders, subject-matter experts and the users themselves — buyers, buyer assistants, suppliers and master-data associates — through interviews and observation.
System diagram of the applications AMA connects to
The eight applications AMA talks to. Every one of these is a place a flow could break.

The hard call

Two sides of the same transaction, wanting different things.

The research produced four personas. Carol, a buyer, needed supplier onboarding to be faster, status tracking throughout, and a way to delegate work to a proxy. Michael, her assistant, wanted the manual process automated and one place to see where every supplier stood. John, a supplier, needed a single place to register with Walmart, notifications on approvals and requests, and less jargon. Amy, a master-data associate, needed to stop incomplete or inaccurate supplier information before it was submitted.

I made Carol the primary persona and John the secondary. The buyer is the one who starts every agreement, so her goals set the structure; the supplier’s needs — clear status, plain language, fewer document cycles — became the requirements every buyer-side flow had to meet.

Suppliers need to be able to onboard themselves as smoothly as possible.

From the vision statement

How the work got made

Six phases of research before a single screen.

The research

  1. Kickoff and literature

    Kickoff meetings, then a literature review of the domain.

  2. Audits

    Product, prototype and competitive audits.

  3. Interviews

    Stakeholder interviews, then subject-matter expert interviews.

  4. Observation

    User and customer interviews, and watching them work.

The six research phases
The six phases, in order: kickoff, literature review, product audits, stakeholder interviews, SME interviews, user observation.

From there the method was goal-directed design: problem and vision statements, context scenarios built around the personas, design requirements, then the interaction framework — sketches, wireframes, key path scenarios and validation scenarios for the edge cases — before refining to full-resolution screens and testing them with users.

Supplier onboarding experience, current state
The current-state map of supplier onboarding — where the ambiguity and the waiting sat before anything was redrawn.
Task flow worked out on sticky notes
The flow before the wireframes.

The craft

What the application lets people do.

The shipped surfaces

  1. Onboarding

    Search and onboard existing suppliers; invite new suppliers to onboard.

  2. Contracts

    Retrieve supplier contracts; create and renew agreements.

  3. Conversation

    Contextual messaging throughout onboarding, with every party involved in an agreement.

  4. Status

    Supplier onboarding status, especially through the contract phase.

Annotated wireframe of the supplier management screen
The supplier screen, annotated. Fifteen user types meet on surfaces like this one.
Supplier information and invitation steps in the shipped product
Supplier information and invitation steps from the shipped application.

Impact

It launched on 8 October 2020 and was measured.

67
NPS
6.2/7
Ease of use
6.3/7
Average satisfaction
5,000
Users at launch

Scores from moderated UserZoom sessions with users.

For the detailed case study, reach out to me (opens Gmail in a new tab).

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