Reducing pricing errors through user-centered design
Senior User Experience Designer, DICK’S Sporting Goods
Role and company background
DICK’S Sporting Goods (DSG) is the largest sporting goods retailer in the United States. During my time at DSG, I worked as a senior user experience designer on the pricing and promotions product team. Our team was responsible for managing the internal tools and data services used by our brick and mortar stores and ecomm properties to accurately price items for our customers.
Background
The pricing technology team at DICK’S Sporting Goods (DSG) is responsible for all tools and services that manage prices. Our team consisted of myself, a product manager, 8 engineers, and a junior designer.
The tools and processes we supported included everything from a simple price change (this football was $15.99, we are now going to sell it for $12.99) to temporary promotions (ex.Buy One, Get One Free golf balls for Father’s Day).
The problem
The previous promotion planning tool at DICK’S was built to create print promotions, and business strategy was changing. User feedback showed that the tool was clunky, difficult to use, and prone to cause errors.
The legacy tool (PPS) was built to create print ads and the price changes associated with those promotions. To create a promotion, users have to dig through various layers of application hierarchy, open various pop-ups and menus, and are often left scratching their heads when promotions are rejected for setup errors.
Example user flow of creating a promotion in PPS. Captured through user observations, each card represents a change of state. This image is too small to see details, but is meant to illustrate the overly complicated state of the legacy system.
Finding a solution
One of my challenges was separating the needs of various personas. Initial prototypes of our app had all kinds of pricing data included with the intention of helping the users make a smart decision when setting up a promotion.
This was highly desired by executive stakeholders who hoped to drive better business decisions. Through my research, I learned that the end-users were primarily concerned with speed and accuracy of data entry as all financial planning happened at levels above them.
With this information in mind, we were able to streamline the data shown to users and add outcomes to our roadmap to enable data-driven planning for the appropriate personas in the future.
I conducted card sorting with users to determine the minimal number of inputs and pieces of data needed to create a promotion
I tested prototypes of potential solutions with users from several different merchant teams.
Prototype testing and improved information architecture from my card sorting activities helped us uncover a cleaner, more straightforward flow.
Outcome - Faster, more reliable promotion setup
Results
The resulting product - PriceIQ - is an application that allows merchants to quickly and easily set up promotions in one step. By targeting a subset of all promotions, merchants can now set up their most commonly used promotion types in less than half the time it would take in the legacy system.
At the time I left the project, we had driven:
50% reduction in time to create promotions
~80% reduction in errors compared to previous year
Increased user confidence
“We often deal with vendors that are very sensitive to how we price their items, and PriceIQ makes me way more confident that I’m setting up promotions correctly.”
-DSG Merchant in Golf
Reflection
When you are replacing legacy systems, it’s often tempting to throw everything out and start from scratch to create something new and shiny.
Designing PriceIQ was an exercise in paring back and ruthlessly prioritizing based on user needs. By focusing on core functionality we were able to build an engaged user base that helped inform some of the more innovative features we later added.