Home Depot – User Research for Item Data Management

When I joined the Item Data Management (IDM) team, there wasn’t a UX team member that I was replacing. There was no documented understanding of the primary users of the system, suppliers who needed to provide all of the data about their products that the Home Depot required in order to sell their products in stores or online, or the process that they experienced trying to provide the data.

Process

When I joined the team, I could ask four different team members or stakeholders a question about how suppliers used the IDM tool and I would get four different answers. Before I would be able to start making recommendations to improve the user experience, I needed to fully understand what they needed to do and why.

Research

I interviewed all of the users of the tool, stakeholders, and upstream/downstream partners to gain a deep understanding a supplier’s journey through the process and the problems they encountered.

Solution

I documented my learnings with a process map and a journey map for each user type.

Outcomes

The team and stakeholders had an aligned understanding of the tool’s users and how they used it to do their daily jobs. This allowed me to move into making recommendations to improve their experience. I implemented a feedback tool that allowed me to show stakeholders an incremental increase to user satisfaction scores as my recommendations went into production.