Procurement Platform
Lark Procurement
Delve into the procurement SaaS platform and business scenarios to enhance the procurement experience, making it more powerful, straightforward, and user-friendly.
My Role
From strategic design to design execution, by deeply understanding the business, continuously discovering user value, and meeting business requirements. Defining design direction, identifying opportunities, and participating in the entire process of user research and product requirement formulation, leading to a comprehensive upgrade of the product to V3.0.
Company
Bytedance
Role
UX/UI Designer
Year
2020 - 2021
The Challenge
As the company experiences rapid growth and business lines expand swiftly, giving rise to new procurement needs, how can we assist in business expansion while maintaining efficiency and flexibility?
Discovery
2020 Lark Procurement
In the V2.0 system, all procurement operations are configured within a single process, resulting in poor adaptability that fails to accommodate all business scenarios. Complex operations necessitate additional customized development, resulting in limited scalability and flexibility. The overall sourcing process is fragmented, as strategies, tasks, and outcomes are separated across different projects, leading to a lack of integrated workflow experience when utilized.
Starting From Listening
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With the growth and changes in our business, there is a constant need to add new procurement categories. Currently, there is no designated space for these additions, and we hope that in the future, everything becomes configurable.
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Currently, sourcing is managed in a fragmented manner, with divisions into strategies, tasks, and outcomes. However, it's not necessary to separate these components; they all constitute a single sourcing process.
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Clearly distinguishing different procurement scenarios would make it much more convenient for procurement professionals to carry out their operations.
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New Design Goals
Simplify the complex system to meet the requirements of various business scenarios and connect the entire procurement process seamlessly.
How to get there?
The most significant challenge I face in this project is how to enhance the overall product experience efficiently and cost-effectively, given the limitations of team resources, time to launch, and technological constraints. This improvement needs to cater to the dynamic nature of our business while also preparing us for future commercialization. After a rapid exploration phase of two weeks, it has become apparent that templates can greatly align with our objectives and cater to diverse business requirements. Furthermore, enabling business stakeholders to create new templates has significantly improved reusability, configurability, and reduced the cost of custom development. This approach creates a comprehensive and closed-loop product ecosystem.
Solution Strategies
On the other hand, to enhance the integrated experience of the product workflow, we've shifted from managing each procurement stage separately to consolidating all procurement stages within a single project management structure. We've also introduced a task-oriented approach to guide users through the project, ensuring they are well-informed about the task stages, required to-do items, task completion progress, and quick navigation to task locations. This approach assists users in efficiently completing their daily tasks and boosting productivity.
Solution
2021 Lark Procurement
For the Lark Procurement V3.0 upgrade, a brand-new template repository will be established, and the cohesiveness of projects will be improved. The hierarchy and distribution of information on task cards will be reshaped. To enhance the overall information browsing experience, each card's information will be categorized and simplified into 1-3 distinct types. This approach will maintain a balanced amount of information across different task cards, accommodating lengthy texts and table elements more effectively, ensuring clear and reasonable button distribution to reduce user decision-making costs. This will minimize overall information noise while improving adaptability and comfort across varying screen sizes.
Card Information Hierarchy
Diverse Template Library to Meet Various Business Scenarios
Through categorization tags, search, and filtering, quickly locate templates that suit your specific business needs. Templates come with preset content, eliminating the need for users to start from scratch and thus enhancing work efficiency.
Template previews offer real-time interactions and multi-dimensional task information, assisting users in making informed decisions before starting a project.
Integrated Project Management Guides Users Through Task Completion
Unified management of procurement processes, including strategies, tasks, and outcomes, within the same project. Additionally, provide task navigation, progress tracking, and completion status information to assist users in project completion.
The Maximum Limit of Long Text And Table Display
Screen Adaptation Rules
Next
How can we assist users in establishing their template libraries in a simple and efficient manner?
Project And Task Templates
To ensure the flexibility of template libraries across various businesses, provide configurable project templates. Business stakeholders can create distinct templates for different business needs. They should be able to quickly drag and drop tasks from the existing task library or use modular components to build entirely new project templates from scratch.
Modular Components
Customize templates and project workflows based on specific business requirements, avoiding the need for custom development. Leverage a reusable task library for swift drag-and-drop task inclusion in new projects, thereby saving time and boosting efficiency.
Customizable Project Templates Enhance Business Scalability and Expansion
In addition to the existing task library, users can also opt to create entirely new task modules. Corresponding to various components, this feature offers simple and diverse content customization. Users can easily craft new, exclusive templates through drag-and-drop interactions.
Modular Components for Swiftly Constructing Tailored Templates
Result Validation
Within a span of two months, we accomplished a comprehensive upgrade to V3.0. To validate the redesigned outcome, I employed the Maze online platform for quick usability testing. Using the Technology Adoption Model (TAM), I gauged the technological acceptance of the product. By analyzing various metrics, I gained insights into users' utilization of the new features and workflows. This encompassed task completion rates, perceived ease of use (PEU), perceived usefulness (PU), flexibility, and satisfaction. Additionally, targeted testing interviews were conducted to address optimization areas. This approach facilitated our assessment of the new product version and iterative improvements.
The results for various metrics are as follows: Task completion rate: 100%, Usability score: 5.6 (on a scale of 1-7), Perceived usefulness score: 6.2 (on a scale of 1-7), Flexibility score: 5.6 (on a scale of 1-7), Satisfaction score: 6.4 (on a scale of 1-7), resulting in an average score of 5.95.
Based On User Feedback
