Wayfair Premium Brand Home
As a product design lead within Wayfair's, "Partner Home," platform, I designed from scratch the B2B application, "Premium Brand Home." This application enables home goods manufacturers and Wayfair to negotiate and manage at scale (100s+ of items per account) products included in high-profile Wayfair branding, marketing and distribution programs (i.e., "Premium Brands"). Before the Premium Brand Home application, Wayfair and thousands of participating partners administered all the transactional details and communication by emailing spreadsheets back and forth.
This manual approach resulted in numerous pain points for all parties, among them slow turnaround times, increased miscommunication, data errors and mis-synchronization, limits to scalability, and excessive overhead. Additionally, the spreadsheet approach only supported the initial phase during which a partner's products were added to Wayfair programs - partners had no visibility into the status and performance of their products after they were enrolled.
In an agile, startup-like environment, I designed the functional core of the application over several weeks in late 2020. The business and user requirements were minimal and fluid, and my designs served as an initial "source of truth" for the project.
- I introduced a lifecycle structure as a means for organizing products in "Premium Brand" programs. This enables users to understand - and take action on - products potentially and already enrolled in programs.
- I created a flexible and extensible application design, adapting the standard Partner Home design system, which was originally conceived for catalog and asset management.
- I leveraged existing design system components to build microinteractions by which users could understand and negotiate important business terms.
- I conceived and designed a "mini dashboard" enabling partners to quickly and easily understand statuses, changes, and required actions across the hundreds of their products enrolled in Premium Brand programs.
During the first part of 2021, I personally conducted several rounds of user testing, employing progressively refined prototype applications. We launched the MVP of Premium Brand Home in June, 2021, and it has consistently exceeded the KPIs established for it.
