Tesco Supplier Setup

My role:
UX/UI Design
UX Research
Service Design

Tesco is the largest supermarket in the UK, with over 3300 stores nationally. Their success is in part due to their vast supplier network, which enables them to meet customer needs competitively.

In 2023, I joined their in-house product team responsible for facilitating supplier onboarding. Their legacy onboarding process was manual, involved hundreds of emails and was prone to delay – putting launch dates and commercials at risk. The team had recently released an MVP solution: a self-serve website, designed to refine and consolidate the process. It was a welcome step in the right direction, reducing the lead time required by over 20% and paving the way for future automation. However, the team had since been struggling to meaningfully build upon their initial release.

The problem

The team were keen to start implementing the second phase of their product strategy, but couldn’t achieve momentum. I identified three key problems the team were facing.

1. The Figma design file had grown rapidly, with a focus on delivery – disparate sections of functionality, scoped to tech tickets. It was difficult to understand the user journey as a new designer, and therefore difficult to meaningfully iterate on the designs.

2. The team were receiving dozens of user support requests a week. This was significantly slowing strategic product development, as product and engineering effort was dedicated to tactical mitigation. It was also undermining the effectiveness of the ‘self-serve’ product.

3. The team were finding it difficult to prioritise initiatives and measure product success. The broader supplier onboarding team (responsible for service) were lacking alignment.

In order to solve these problems and set the team up for success, I created and ran three distinct workstreams – a design file refactor, a usability discovery, and a series of measurement workshops.

Design file refactor

First, we completely overhauled the Figma file. We visualised the end-to-end user experience, ensuring:

• User roles & handoffs were clearly represented

• Common patterns were componentised

• The designs were aligned with what had been built

This helped create a stronger foundation for future design iterations.

Usability discovery

To better understand why the team were receiving so many support requests, I created a comprehensive research plan with multiple methodologies.

Support ticket analysis

I analysed over 60 tickets logged in Zendesk, the team’s customer support platform. I was able to identify key UX themes, usability issues and understand which user types were being disproportionally affected by the system changes. I also identified a gap in our insight - the comms between Tesco support roles & end users. This work then formed the basis of an automated framework for analysing user feedback, to better support future strategic decision-making.

Heuristic evaluation

I compiled a team of designers to conduct a heuristic evaluation of the current system, using Jakob Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics. This evaluation helped us identify and prioritise 100+ usability issues. It also helped validate some of the usability issues found in the support ticket analysis.

Comprehension testing

In order to build a deeper understanding of the issues faced, I created a plan for moderated comprehension testing sessions to:

• Evaluate the current user comprehension of the Supplier Setup experience

• Understand the end-to-end user journey of onboarding a supplier

I created discussion guides to facilitate the sessions, and participant guides to support the colleagues taking part. Unfortunately I rolled off the project before we were able to run the first sessions, so I onboarded an in-house designer to see this research through.

Measurement workshops

A key issue highlighted in the usability discovery was that the broader supplier onboarding team were not aligned to meet a common goal. The product team had defined a vision, but didn’t have much in the way of objectives and key results to focus their short term efforts. The customer support teams in India (key user types within the platform, and responsible for maintaining service) were working to separate success metrics, which was contributing to internal conflicts.

In order to create alignment and make the team aware of the issues faced, I ran a series of workshops with the entire team. The team:

• Ideated around what success looked like, blockers faced and current/potential methods of measurement

• Synthesised OKRs to ladder up to our shared vision

• Started mapping tools & dependencies against these OKRs in order to plan accordingly

Key outcomes

• Identifying the root causes of problems rather than fixing them reactively. The team might have got stuck for months if not for decisive action to properly understand the ‘why’ behind support requests.

• Shifting from a product mentality to a service mentality. Through workshops, the team was able to broaden their appreciation of what was required to deliver a truly successful experience for users – including organisational change.

• Some ideation & design iterations ready to bring into user testing. Our research helped us define a clear problem statement & hypothesis to design to.

• A new in-house designer onboarded to the project, ready to take it to new heights! Comprehensive documentation ensured she had a solid foundation to build upon.