Leading the Digital B2B Marketplace for Metal Products
Period
December 2022 - July 2023
Redesigning the
Steel Marketplace
Bryzos is a Steel Trading Platform, facilitating sales between individual buyers and sellers.
Users often grapple with uncertainty and apprehension amid fluctuating prices and relationships. Entrusting sellers to set their own prices led to inconsistency and imposed significant challenges on businesses during critical, high priority orders.
Through thoughtful enhancements, weve refined the Bryzos aesthetic and introduced instant, standardized pricing, offering users a seamless moment of satisfaction and ease.
Their Goal: Empowering users with swift transactions that take no more than 60 seconds.
Discovery
Workshops, User Research, Interviews, Surveys, Competitive Analysis
Workshop #1
User Personas
Conducting a user persona workshop offered crucial insights into the distinct dynamics of both buyers and sellers.
Buyers
Emotional Journey Mapping
Workshop #2
For each persona, I collaborated with the Bryzos team members to construct Emotional Journey Maps, meticulously charting the user experience to pinpoint key touch points, pain points, and moments of delight. These maps provided invaluable insights, guiding us in crafting a user-centric approach that resonated effectively with each individuals needs and emotions.
Workshop #3
Future Trends
The aim of the Future Trends workshop was to dissect the changing dynamics of the steel industry.
Jobs to be Done
Workshop #4
A Jobs to Be Done JTBD workshop is a strategic session designed to understand the fundamental tasks or "jobs" that users are trying to accomplish with a product or service. The primary purpose of this workshop within the UX process is to shift the focus from merely understanding user demographics or behaviours to grasping the underlying motivations and goals driving those behaviours.
In this workshop I learned about the value that Bryzos brings to a variety of users. An example of underlying motivations is represented in the following JTBD phrase:
"When I pull stock from my yard, I want to verify that material is available so I can prepare orders prior to shipping and feel accomplished."
Business Process Diagram
Crafting a business process diagram simplified the identification of pain points by offering a holistic view and spotlighting key dependencies within the chain of operations. By pinpointing these pain points, were poised to develop a product that optimizes workflows, improves communication, and operates on data driven insights.
After working with the Bryzos team to nail down the Buyer Seller business process diagram, I was able to identify the major pain points.
Complex Payment Structures
Both accounts payable and accounts receivable are fragmented, with multiple payees and clients, rather than a centralized system under Bryzos.
Complicated Buyer -Seller Relationships
Some buyers and sellers exhibit compatibility issues, leading to missed sales opportunities.
Insufficient Order Transparency
When buyers engage multiple sellers through bidding, those sellers remain uninformed if another offer gets accepted.
Time - Consuming Price Search
Buyers invest excessive time hunting for competitive prices, often resorting to phone calls and personal networks.
ERP System Incompatibility
The absence of automatic stock updates to the ERP system upon purchase results in inventory discrepancies.
Manual Buyouts
The manual buyout process, where sellers need to procure items from other sources, adds complexity and delays.
Solution
Introduce a unified payment system where Bryzos acts as the intermediary, streamlining payments for both parties and enhancing financial clarity. This approach not only helps users sidestep interpersonal challenges in their collaborations but also minimizes issues related to empty bidding and ensures order clarity.
Solution
Implement standardized, equitable pricing established by Bryzos, streamlining the pricing process, eliminating manual searches, and enhancing transparency.
Solution
Develop seamless integrations between the marketplace platform and popular ERP systems. Ensure that stock updates are automatic and real-time, minimizing discrepancies and ensuring accurate inventory management.
Solution
Streamline the buyout process by integrating a feature that automatically checks and sources items from alternate distributors or manufacturers. This reduces manual intervention, speeds up transactions, and ensures product availability.
Ideation
Brainstorming, Information Architecture, User Flows, Site Maps
Site Maps
Creating site maps offered us a visual representation of a websites structure to enhance information architecture, facilitate user navigation, and support effective collaboration among design teams.
User Flows
Building user flows helped us navigate the product by providing a visual representation of the step by step interactions and pathways, resulting in an intuitive application.
Design
Wireframing, Testing, Prototyping, Iterative Design
Up Next
Bryzos loved working with us so much that they came back
for a second phase coupled with a documentary project.
See Phase 2
