Nordstrom Enrichment
Creating a vision for a supplier-facing Enrichment program
OVERVIEW
PRODUCT ENRICHMENT
The Problem: Nordstrom’s Product Enrichment experience is a multi-team effort to gather, correct/update, maintain, and publish products to our website. These teams often work in silos which can cause items to fall through the cracks and each team has inefficient workflows. How can we redesign the enrichment experience to be more streamlined and vendor-facing?
The Solution: Envisioning and designing a future vendor-facing experience where Suppliers and Brands can self-serve by uploading their product data, digital assets, managing their catalogs, and meeting Nordstrom’s item standards for publication.
The Process: Conducted informational interviews across 5 different teams to learn about Nordstrom’s current enrichment process today. I partnered with a Product Manager to brainstorm scenarios, use cases, and how we can utilize AI to help speed up tasks. I created a user storyboard to capture core workflows where Nordstrom employees are more focused on relationship-building with brands/supplier instead of chasing down product information.
My Role: UX Designer II
Tools: Figma, MS Co-pilot for AI Image Generation
Artifacts: Informational interviews, Customer Storyboard
SCENARIOS + USER STORYBOARD
Partnered with Product Manager to envision a new way of collecting and managing product data, a future where we can combine PIM and DAM together. Also envisioned a self-service management portal for suppliers and brands to manage their own data, combined with AI to help automate tasks or make intelligent recommendations on product data and hierarchy. Together we identified the 80% use case, and the 20% use case and used Word to document and brainstorm what typical product data upload scenarios were.
After identifying the use cases and creating scenarios, I shifted the work from Word into Figma to create a User Storyboard that would best illustrate and capture the goals we wanted to achieve: envisioning a new PIM enrichment workflow that is mostly reliant on sellers uploading product data in order to make it “Sellable,” that is, all the information Nordstrom needs on a product in order to go live on our website.
NEXT STEPS
Business priorities shifted during this project, and resources were moved elsewhere so this project is now put on hold. However, the vision is still valid and continues to hold excitement and relevance among the team. If I could continue the project, I would focus on the following:
Evangelizing this vision to other business stakeholders
Nordstrom Marketplace already utilizes a similar supplier-facing PIM/DAM program called Mirakl with great success; a great start for me would be to deep dive into Mirakl’s workflows and user experience to draw inspiration from.
Utilize Artificial Intelligence to speed up a competitive analysis of other PIM/DAM and Supplier facing programs in the wild. A couple that I would look at: SalsifyXM, Plytix, Akeneo, etc. Looking at competitors is not only a great source of visuals, but also a great way to look at outstanding features.
Work with my Product Manager to determine what core requirements would be in a MVP first launch, build a roadmap and identify key milestones when planning the execution phase.
Start creating concept designs around core flows such as uploading, analyzing items, updating/correcting items, completeness tracker, and publishing.
