B2B E-Commerce Platform for Materials and Chemicals

A manufacturer of chemicals introduced its online catalog and e-commerce capabilities. The customer-facing site needed a redesign and e-commerce capabilities. Our client had compiled over 2,000 requirements that became our backlog. Some requirements were epics (e.g., one line item saying "the site must have search capabilities," which was the only mention of search), while most translated to acceptance criteria.

The client's site prior to our engagement had been designed in 1999. We introduced a minimalist look using modern, familiar components. The design had a good amount of white space for easy readability.

Our limited user tested proved that customers could better understand the applications and uses of each product thanks to the simpler two-tier navigation we introduced.

This project was very much an exercise in information architecture. Our client's product was very specialized. with only a handful of variants, however, each variant could have thousands of SKUs based on its polyhierarchal taxonomy.

Customers often purchased by the truckload. This led to a complex purchasing flow that separated order from shipment from purchase order. The business rules around cart and checkout numbered in the thousands.

See the final designs featured in Jared's portfolio.

Around this time it was common to use Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) for product merchandising and Hybris as the e-commerce engine. This was during SAP's acquisition of Hybris, so they were still considered separate products.

The product detail page and the purchasing flow was served by Hybris. The majority of the UI was AEM. We therefore needed a shared CSS between both platforms. This is very common today, but back then it seemed like an insurmountable problem.

Solr was the search platform.

• Client-facing engagement lead managing three business analysts
• Mapped over 2,000 requirements to 400+ user stories as due diligence to the client
• Functional lead for Search