My Role
First UX hire on the Item Data Management (IDM) team — responsible for establishing the team’s baseline understanding of its users before any design work could start.
Problem
When I joined the IDM team, there was no UX person before me, and no documented understanding of who actually used the system or how. IDM existed so suppliers could submit the product data Home Depot required to sell their items in stores and online — but nobody on the team could describe that process the same way twice. Ask four stakeholders how suppliers used the tool and you’d get four different answers.
Research
Before making any recommendations, I needed the team to be working from the same facts. I interviewed every user type of the tool — suppliers, internal stakeholders, and upstream and downstream partners — to build a real picture of a supplier’s end-to-end journey and where it broke down. I uncovered confusion about the workflow to get the vendor’s product data approved and ready to be using online and in stores, and issues with how inventory with multiple buy or sell packs was handled.
Solution
I documented the findings as a process map and a journey map for each user type, giving the team a shared, visual reference for who they were designing for and where things went wrong — replacing four different verbal answers with one artifact everyone could point to.
Outcomes
The team and stakeholders aligned on a single understanding of the tool’s users for the first time, which is what let me move from research into actual design recommendations. I built a feedback mechanism that tracked user satisfaction as those recommendations shipped, and showed stakeholders incremental gains over time as the number of days required for new products to arrive on store shelves was decreased by ~20%.
Hello! 