NICOLE PLANTE
In 2020, Literati expanded their brand by purchasing a book fair company. We wanted to create a book fair better than the big red competitor (Scholastic) and we centered user experience essential to our business strategy.
Our users include book fair coordinators, students, parents, and caregivers.
As the UX Designer for Book Fairs, my main focus was designing the digital platforms for book fair coordinators.
While I did some work for eFairs, the majority of my work was for OpenBook, Literati's platform for book fair coordinators to plan, manage, and close their book fair.
The current solution was sending a spreadsheet to each book fair coordinator. Each spreadsheet would differ based on revenue tier. This method was time-consuming for both internal stakeholders and book fair coordinators and not automated or scalable.
How might we make it easier for book fair coordinators to order replenishment supplies?
After the in-person book fair kicks off, books and school supplies may be low and book fair coordinators need to order more books from Literati to meet the demand and optimize their revenue.
While Literati will automatically send books based on sales, we offer manual Replenishment as a way for book fair coordinators to request additional supplies.
This can be costly, time-sensitive, and variable.
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Quickly I did research on what we collectively know about our current process and the competition.
- Searching for an item on spreadsheet is long and time-consuming.
- Often the guardrails for Replenishment are overlooked or unclear.
- The current process consumes a lot of time from internal teams with manual review and input.
With the product manager, we kept the initial scope simple:
- Support books based on revenue tiers
- Show internal process guardrails in the UI
- Provide expectations for replenishment
Measure: Customer feedback for replenishment, reduction in Customer Service tickets.
In my exploration I approached it from several models:
- Search
- Two-step (Find and Add)
- Browse catalog, add to cart
There are not many examples of for a B2B workflow without having a paid account. A similar mental model is a small business ordering supplies. I did research with Etsy, Shopify and Barnes and Noble.
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- Users may want to browse by category to see what's possible for ordering.
- Our current process does not have firm guidelines.
- We often allow "write-in" requests from the broader catalog.
As a part of early feedback, I have a standing meeting with stakeholders to get feedback on early exploration and direction. I use this time as a low-lift way to test some directions and include stakeholder feedback early in the process.
Feedback from stakeholders generally preferred the browse catalog model, but I was also surprised to learn additional things about the current internal process for Replenishment.
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The biggest challenge was establishing a process for customer service and fulfillment, which was not part of the scope for design.
I focused on reflecting the business rules and representing "write-in" requests.
After digging into process, "write-ins" were not write-ins at all. It could not just be any book, but merely outside of the "best-selling" catalog.
Problem: How might we allow users to request items from the full catalog, but mitigate the expectations?
Solution: Bring in all possible catalog items into the search catalog view. Give visual indications in search and check out that these items have different rules and are less likely to be fulfilled. Eventually we agreed upon calling them "low-stock" items.
Reason: This fits with supply/demand mental model and gives indication that it is less likely to be fulfilled.
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From the beginning, we narrowed in on Replenishment as a key pain point that could have impact.
After rolling out Replenishment V1 and V2 we hit our key result exactly: 20% reduction in support tickets. 🎉
In addition to this metric, we invested in and supporting scalable processes between Literati and our book fair coordinators. 📈
From our End of Book Fair surveys, the qualitative feedback from our book fair coordinators was clear:
"The replenishment process is a vast improvement from last year."
"Very simple and clear to order."
"Replenishment was easy but I didn't get all the books I wanted or in time."
The biggest takeaway from this project was that Replenishment was bigger problem than any UI solution could offer. In the complex world of supply and demand, book fair coordinators are operating with the notion that the shelves should be full, so they over order or are disappointed when we send less than requested. From a business prospective, Replenishment is often too expensive for the revenue gain. However, book fair coordinators have come to expect this feature from our competitor.
In our planning for the future, Product, Data Analytics, and I met to discuss ways that we could optimize Replenishment. Some ideas that we had for potential solutions:
1. Customer Education in order to be "lean" in their supply; only operate with monitored replenishment.
2. Leverage wishlists data to predict the supply needed for the book fair.
3. Customer rewards for not requesting Replenishment and using paid orders/online orders instead.
While I am no longer with Literati, I'm curious to see if they implement creative solutions to balance user needs and the bottom line.
© 2023 Nicole Plante