" Why is signing up so hard? This should be easy."
- a goHerbalife customer
PRODUCT DISCOVERY & DESIGN

Consolidated WMAnalytics

Details
Role
Timeline
  • 1 Product Designer
  • 1 Researcher
  • 1 Product Manager
  • 1 Group PM
  • ~ 5 Engineers
  • 1 Design Manager
  • UX/UI
  • Product Design
  • Research
  • Strategy
  • Design Management
  • 8 Months
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Responsibilities
I served this project as a supporting Product Designer, Manager and Workshop Facilitator. 
Main areas of responsibility: 
Management ( Sprint planning, stakeholder alignment, design quality management)
UXR analysis ( User interviews, synthesis, flows and personas )
Design support ( Weedmaps platform design system “joint design system” )
Lo-fi prototyping support ( basic flow and interactions )

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Project Summary

Weedmaps, a B2C web and mobile application, offers a comprehensive back-office solution for dispensaries, including CRM, CMS, Inventory, POS, ads, and deals management. Despite its strong product lineup, the company identified crucial issues through user feedback that required immediate attention to maintain success in the rapidly evolving market. To address these challenges, Weedmaps conducted a quarterly roadmap discovery workshop, "Tame the Mane," engaging users and stakeholders to uncover three main pain points: lack of essential data access, a disjointed user experience, and a non-intuitive interface. Additionally, users struggled to understand the platform's value proposition, leading to uncertainty about the best services for their businesses. To overcome these challenges, Weedmaps conducted iterative design sprints and developed a foundational design system, resulting in a more cohesive and efficient platform that better served dispensary partners.

In just two months from our alignment workshop, loving named "Tame the Mane" Weedmaps successfully aligned on solutions, bridging cross-functional gaps and creating a stronger, user-centered Weedmaps Analytics experience and scalable Business platform. This enhanced platform empowered retailers with a seamless and intuitive experience, addressing critical pain points and delivering immense value to dispensary partners.

The Goal

Our main mission in this project is to create a single, user-friendly space where retail owners can effortlessly access and manage all their business analytics. By bringing together data from different aspects of their operations in one place, while also aiming to provide them with a convenient and cohesive experience.

The Challenge

Throughout the evolution of our Weedmaps Business platform, we have benefited from the contributions of various vendors, acquisitions, and dedicated product teams. This diversity brought valuable perspectives, but it also resulted in a fragmented experience for retail owners and operations, particularly when seeking insights into their business health metrics.

We started by asking, How might we create an analytics solution that beautifully combines the best aspects of all Weedmaps Business services while also simplifying and building a strong, scalable foundational design system? We knew it wouldn't be a walk in the park, but we were excited to take the first step!

Problem Statement

Our client faces challenges with their analytics dashboard due to fragmented and confusing user experiences within Weedmaps products. They lack essential data and pricing clarity, hindering decision-making and business scalability. Reliable and insightful data is unavailable, leading to a disjointed analytics experience and complicating their dashboard consolidation efforts. If these issues are not addressed promptly, it could significantly impact our company. The lack of streamlined analytics and a consolidated dashboard may lead to inefficient operations, increased costs, and missed revenue opportunities. Without clear pricing insights and ROI calculations, making informed decisions becomes difficult, potentially affecting profitability. Moreover, the absence of reliable data and guidance from Weedmaps could hinder our business scaling and competitive edge. Addressing these challenges promptly is crucial for sustainable growth and staying competitive in the market.

During the collaborative cross functional program planning we worked to Understand the current state of our user's experience and our technology ecosystem, we Discovered and prioritized customer and client problems across B2B, and discussed & Aligned on next steps on path to solutions & unification of the B2B suite.

Research

First, let's identify our problems 

We conducted eight one-on-one interviews with retailers using the Weedmaps Business platform, including lookalike admin analytics users and a former MSO ecomm lead. Several key themes emerged:

📊

The need for comparative data:
Users want to compare their business performance to the competition for better insights.

🗄️

Filtering needs and data segmentation:
Users desire convenient date filters, geographical filtering, and the ability to filter on multiple attributes.

🔢

Understanding metrics & their importance
Users struggle with deciphering metrics and seek contextual definitions or a glossary for better comprehension.

👥

Knowing the customer:
Users crave information about their customers' demographics, behavior, and satisfaction.

📃

Controlling data:
Users unanimously value the ability to download/export raw data, and withholding data raises concerns about data integrity.

While Rachel and Laura led user testing moderated interviews, the team would watch and assist by recording pain points, delights and neutral input to later break into themes during an affinity exersize.

Stakeholder Interviews & Analytics Audit: Additionally during 5 1:1 during interviews with internal stakeholders, including group of product managers and customer support teams, we discovered significant challenges in the analytics pages. Inconsistent design patterns and custom-built components led to a disjointed user experience. Usage analytics were hard to gather, hindering valuable insights. Are assumptions are true standardizing Weedmaps design patterns and analytics is crucial for improving the platform.

Questions asked: 

What type of metrics do you show?

How are analytics being shown?

Why is the information being displayed in that specific format

What is the customer journey to get to analytics?

What is the expected outcome?

What actions can be taken?

Which metrics are most important to the client?

Whats  in  design?

Whats currently live (launching early Sept)

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We sure love Figmjam, here's where Mari and I recored input during our product team interviews.

Define

Second, let's define our users

Based on the insights gathered after synthesizing our findings from interviews and data analysis. This helped empathize with users' needs and challenges, guiding your design decisions. Also helped us understand the user roles that most likely would be using analytic and reporting services. 

Through user interviews, we develop rough personas to gain insight into users' behaviors, actions, needs, pain points, and psychographic details. These personas aid us in understanding our audience better and inform our decision-making process.

Ideate + Validate

Third, let's explore some solutions

Following the collection of user insights, a team of five members, with me as the facilitator, embarked on a four-day 100% remote design sprint. The primary goal was to expedite the design process and early-stage idea validation with users.

Design Sprint goal: 

In two years time...clients will have a clear, consistent view into how their spend is performing,  are able to use our products on their own, and are confident enough in the value of WM to proactively spend.

The design sprint is a highly engaging and informative process that encourages creativity and teamwork. It enables rapid prototyping and decision-making, leading to efficient problem-solving and innovative product development. But more importantly it should be fun.

As I'm sure you can tell by now, were sure love FigJam. As a mostly remote team, it's essential to have a digital creative space that brings everyone together. FigJam facilitates seamless collaboration and allows us to work together effectively despite being physically apart. Its features empower us to brainstorm, ideate, and visualize ideas in real-time, enhancing our productivity and creativity in a virtual setting.

Ideate + Validate

Fourth, let's create a quick prototype and test with real users

After identifying the most promising ideas, Mari led the development of a usable prototype, while Mari provided support by gathering assets and offering guidance.

Simultaneously, Laura, our UXR expert, recruited a pool of users for testing the prototype.

Testing Results: The user testing yielded highly encouraging results. User satisfaction increased significantly by 30% compared to the previous version. Users appreciated the improved page layout, finding the WMDispatch platform more user-friendly, visually appealing, and intuitive. They particularly liked the ease of finding useful information and additional support.

However, we also identified areas for improvement. Some users had trouble locating the filtering option and expected the individual analytics pages to be in the left menu rather than the top. They expressed the need for a downloadable report view to utilize the data as they pleased. Additionally, users wanted more clarity on the type of metrics they were viewing and how to act on the information.

Competitive Analysis: We conducted a competitive analysis to inspire our design sprint. Common patterns among similar platforms included operational and analytical dashboards to provide critical information quickly. Visualization charts varied, but 3D charts were avoided due to low readability. All platforms used ample whitespace, reducing visual clutter and allowing data to stand out effectively. These insights will shape our platform to deliver an outstanding user experience, outperforming the competition.

To drive our future designs, our teams consistently conduct competitive digital product analyses. We firmly believe in the value of not reinventing the wheel, and often draw inspiration from what our competitors are creating in the marketplace. This approach enables us to stay innovative and remain in sync with industry trends.

Thanks to the well-established Weedmaps Design System, "Joint," Mari efficiently leveraged pre-existing components for her rapid prototype. This allowed her to avoid starting from scratch and saved valuable time during the design process!

An affinity map offers a fantastic advantage as it allows you to easily identify themes and issues from user interviews. It provides a clear visual representation that helps quickly grasp areas with potential for improvement.

Ideate + Validate ( again )

Fifth, let's design and test some more

With the insights gathered we were able to quickly iteate on suggested changes. A couple changes included moving the horizontal navigation to be vertical, left aligned and checked to being sub nav elements. We also made the graphs easier to understand, removing distracting and unhelpful metrics.

Pulling from user feedback we made quick changes to our Order and Shopper Analytics experiences.

Impact

Before we finish, let's go over the results

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100% of participants were able to successfully complete all tasks.
“I didn’t have to think too much. The sequences were nice and simple.

😍

Most participants had positive reactions to the comparative metrics
“I see me using this on a daily basis."

✌🏽

Most said they would use our solution over other products like Leafly.
“The expeience is clean cut and does its job, I’m impressed.”

Reflection

Key Learnings