Pricing

BACKGROUND

I was working on merchandizing team, focusing on pricing system when I joined Walmart. The projects were challenging and fun. I learnt new things every day about this domain. I didn’t believe in the “Everyday low price” until working on the pricing system and learning about the strategies. Now I am 100% convinced and I feel honored to contribute this core area and ultimately bring benefits to our customers.

We worked with these values in mind...

Merchants at Walmart are dedicated to applying downward pressure on price in order to enable customers to “save money, live better”.

So the mission of our tools is to …leveraging our strategy to identify, recommend, automate and seamlessly execute the optimal price for merchants and customers.

Production Work

I was responsible for designing new features and user flows for the existing products to make the tools more powerful.

Scenario Planner - analyse and execute retail changes

Markdown Log - review impacts of price changes and align with budgets

Concept Exploration

And we are also keen on exploring new opportunities. Our team actively discover new technologies and develop new product concepts to improve merchants’ workflow. I had the pleasure to join a 6-week concept sprint, working with product managers, engineers, and business partners to frame problems, ideate and prototype new concepts, and test the ideas.

I worked closely with my product partner to define the ideal experience of concept Pricing Simulator.

My General Process

Let me reveal more details of my process using a case study...

CASE STUDY

Markdown Insights

Brief

Our merchants used to exchange excel sheets with each other to get aligned with the budget. Markdown Log is a tool aggregating all the markdown entries in one place, and allows merchants to collaborate and take actions efficiently. I worked closely with my product manager to put together a “north star” version of the concept Decision Insight in addition of the current Markdown Log tool to improve its experience.

Duration

~ 1 month (2019)

My Role

UX research, UX design, Prototype

Team

Diego Angarita (Product manager)

The challenge

Merchants gather information about their business from different places in order to comprehend the impacts of the markdowns and make optimal adjustments, while the Markdown Log only functioned as an execution tool. It leads to an unpleasant experience of opening many tools and files. This wastes a lot of the associates' time.

‍How might we provide a seamless experience for merchants to identify issues/opportunities at high level, drill down, make decisions and take actions?

RESEARCH

How do they handle it today?

As we were planning the timeline, the first thing we decided to do is to gain insights about this problem. In the first week, we conducted interviews with users of 3 different classes to understand their current practice.

From the research, we identified:
1. Key metrics and data type for identifying issues
2. Common issues and actions taken

IDEATION

Based on the findings, we created persona concluding different user types and their pain points.

Due to confidential reason this picture is blurred.

We also had a brainstorming session inviting business partner and engineer team, and drafted a user flow that addressed pain points of top use cases.

DESIGN ITERATIONS

Test and learn

In the middle of the second week, I started to iterate on designs and conduct user tests. I checked in with my product partner every other day to stay aligned and get instant feedback. I also brought the design into design critiques.

/ Iteration 1

Drill down the data using interactive data viz

We conducted user test, proved some of our assumptions, and uncovered several problems:

1. Our merchants are more sensitive to numbers than graphs. Data visualization does help them quickly grasp the trend/proportion. But they need to make decision by seeing the precise numbers next to each other.
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2. Some other financial metrics used for evaluating the business will also determine how they act.
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3. It is cumbersome for them to switch to see different types of breakdowns. Moreover, they only use the graph to get a quick insight before proceed to the table.

/ Iteration 2

Build interaction between data visualization and the table

In the second round of user test, the design won users’ praises. But we also discovered that it is not quite efficient for users to proceed to taking actions.

/ Iteration 3

Bridge the gap between making decision and taking action

READOUT

Tell a story about the users

After a few more rounds of reviews with the stakeholders, we landed on the final design and user flow, and prepared for the presentation to product leadership.

In order to tell a good story, we decided to write out the workflow as a narrative. And I created prototype using the real data.

Narrative - Credit: Diego (PM) for this final artifact

The picture is blurred because it contains real historical data

Final Design
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Userflow in wireframe

So how did it went?

This concept was approved by product leadership to be moved to the next phase. But due to new priorities, it was pushed to the next year (2020) when I was transferred to Grocery team.

Some thoughts of working at Pricing

It was a fascinating journey, starting from “I knew nothing about merchandizing😨”, ending with “I know something about Pricing domain🤓”. People working with me were really nice and patient to explain many abstract and obscure terminologies. When I finally can say something in a meeting with business partners, I realize I could never stop studying because new knowledge makes one’s design career rich but fresh.

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