Candid Wholesale B2B platform
In 2021, I had the opportunity to join Candid Wholesale, an exciting start up in the B2B space. Candid is a platform for Wholesalers and Retailers to conduct business. Based on the founders’ real-world experience owning a wholesale business, Candid was a platform uniquely focused on day to day business needs and pain points brands experience in doing wholesale business.
PROBLEM
When I joined Candid, they already had an impressive array of features and functionality in place to enable users to conduct wholesale business, but the app experience was in many respects a challenge. Candid is an agile environment focused on shipping features as soon as feasible to get them into users’ hands, and their technical output was indeed impressive. However, much of the feature development had been piecemeal and ad-hoc, and this showed in the UI. Features were added over time, resulting in interfaces which were crowded, confusing, and lacking in clear priority.
RESULTS
My team produced final Design and Specification documents that were of the highest quality, on-brand, technically achievable, and fully specified and documented for Development. Comprehensive overhauls of Onboarding, Ordering, Order Management, Product Manager and Wholesale Catalog were designed, prototyped, user-tested, developed and launched to Candid’s users.
SOLUTION
Working alongside the CEO & COO, I spearheaded the creation of a Product Roadmap to ensure timely delivery of high-value features while making sure that the prioritization and sequencing of that work mapped to long-term Strategic Product goals. I worked to build consensus on balancing the competing priorities of Feature Overhaul, New Feature Development, and addressing techincal debt. I produced design output as an individual contributor, while also managing design resources as direct reports.
Orders are the heart of the Candid Wholesale app. Containing an extensive array of functionality unique to the business of Wholesale, the challenge was to make all of those features available to the user, while leaving the interface clear, uncluttered and intuitive.
It was crucial that the Onboarding sequence be an expression of Candid’s brand. A recent branding exercise had established a color palette, and an illustration library. Everything was built on that basic framework. The illustration was used to create an approachable and inviting space, in which users could see characters and objects in which they would recognize their own experience as businesspeople. They imbue a sense in the user that Candid understands their experience, and uniquely supports them.
The first major in-app feature to get a complete overhaul was the Products section, allowing the user to select, curate and publish products to their Product Catalog. The Products section also allows managing inventory to ensure the ability to fulfill, including pulling inventory from the user’s e-commerce platforms, and setting pricing, either custom, or based on retail prices from the e-commerce channel partner. The overall challenge is to provide all of this diverse functionality created to support users with varying needs, in a way that it is all intuitively accessible, without overwhelming an individual user with features they do not use.
Orders are the heart of Candid Wholesale. They are not simply a transaction, they represent a conversation between two trusted parties, ensuring that both come away satisfied once the actual transaction is finalized and fulfilled. In the real world, orders entail a great deal of complexity: orders are drafted, and passed back and forth between the parties with suggested changes until all of the specifics of inventory and timing are agreeable to both.
Tracking Orders at a view is a core function for nearly all users. To improve the experience of our Orders list, I redesigned the Orders list view to optimize for a clear view current activity, with the ability to easily filter the Order list based on any criteria of interest to the user, and to make sure the remains aware of the applied filters at all times.