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AIRSPACE · INTERNAL PLATFORM

Unlocking Aerospace Growth by Fixing Vendor Access

Overview of the vendor order placement experience

At Airspace, I designed multiple flows and screens to support a new "order placer" user role. These updates enabled customers to add third-party vendors to access their accounts in a limited capacity and place orders on their behalf.

Impact

Streamlining account/user access for vendors led to 39 orders placed through this new role within a month of release.

Core Team

1 Designer (me), 1 Developer, 1 Product Manager

Role

End-to-end Product Designer

Duration

6 weeks | May 2023 – July 2023

Note: Certain details are left out and images are intentionally blurry/cannot be viewed in higher resolution to adhere to an NDA. To learn more about this project, please contact me directly.

Project Brief

The Context

What is Airspace?

At Airspace, customers are set up with their own, unique company account. Each team member from a company can then be added into the account via their individual emails. They can then place orders and access real-time updates for their shipments, based on their user role permissions.

Once an order is placed, Airspace uses AI-powered routing and dispatching to ensure timely delivery and provides constant updates for efficient, transparent delivery.

The Business Problem

Our platform restricted business with certain customers who had their own third-party vendors

In 2023, Airspace aimed to increase revenue in the aerospace sector from $2M MRR to $4M MRR by identifying opportunities to increase order volume. Product and account management discovered that customers from this sector often relied on third-party vendors to place orders, but they weren't always choosing Airspace to handle their shipments.

These vendors fit a combination or one of the following profiles:

They work across several of our customers to place orders
They have their own shipping account with Airspace, so their individual team members already have a login tied to their existing company account
They have no shipping account/existing login with Airspace

Addressing these gaps would be crucial to meeting their needs and driving growth.

The Problem (Expanded)

Our login system limited each email address to a single company account

For example, spongebob@kp.com could only be added to "The Krabby Patty" company, but could not be added to "The Chum Bucket" company.

As a result, customers/our account managers tried to "hack" the system in the following ways:

Nesting vendor sub-accounts under each customer account

  • Vendor team members would then need separate credentials for every customer they ordered for through Airspace, causing friction and lowering user traffic
  • This exposed pricing/tracking data that customers didn't want their vendors to see
  • With more accounts nested within their main account, this led to confusing experiences and complex account management for Airspace customers

Entirely separate accounts were created for the vendors to use

  • The separate credentials issue also applied here for vendors
  • Airspace's customer could not track the shipment their vendor placed within their own account, which broke the shipment transparency that Airspace promised
Textron had 18 sub-accounts for different vendors they worked with. The highlighted companies were vendors that even had their own account with Airspace (meaning at least 3 logins to manage shipping across different accounts).

The Challenge

How might we simplify vendor account management while ensuring Airspace customers maintain control over sensitive information?

In addition, the product manager had set a 6-week timeline for this project (including both design and development work), so we would be working with this additional time constraint.

Design Process

Brainstorm & Ideation

I used an audit of existing user role system/permissions to drive discussions on a new solution

After assessing feasibility and scope of several solutions, we decided to introduce a new user "vendor order placer" role with tailored permissions.

Unlike existing roles, emails assigned to this new role could be under multiple company accounts and sub-accounts with the same role, or any other existing roles (in cases where an email already existed under their own company account). Thus, the 1:1 email-to-account restriction was no more.

Prioritization

My team scoped an MVP by prioritizing issues we gathered from our stakeholders and from auditing system capabilities

This clarified what I needed to design and allowed the developer to begin reworking the architecture.

Task and User Flows

Mapping out three different task flows and a user flow across different user groups helped uncover questions like: Who gets notified for new vendor actions, and when?

I brought these new findings to discuss with my team, in stakeholder feedback sessions, and/or evaluate through customer feedback.

Stakeholder Feedback

Internal testing surfaced gaps around legal terminology and new use cases

From testing two prototypes (one for adding/removing vendor users, another for navigating the customer platform as a vendor) with our account management team, I uncovered a few insights:

We needed clearer legal terminology. Upon further inspection, the terms and conditions needed more explicit information to describe this new vendor user role.
There were additional features during the order placement process that customers may want for their vendors (such as hiding the price of orders from vendors, and/or limiting routing options).
Customers will often create will call orders — prepared, but inactive shipments to activate at a later time to fulfill — and needed to assign specific vendor(s) to activate them

With the first two insights, I refined the prototypes and prepped questions for usability testing.

Prioritizing for the Future

Will call activation was a real need, but we could not fully scope it into the remaining project timeline

I had defined a task workflow to discuss implementation of will call activation.  Given we could not fully address this request, my team instead made the following updates to support future iterations:

The developer updated the backend schema for a separate "will call activator" role. Both this new role + the order place role could be assigned to a single email address, giving companies role assignment flexibility.
I simplified the "vendor order placer" role name to "order placer" in the UI. This matched how vendors could have more than one different role in future iterations.

Usability Testing

Three rounds of customer testing led to more iterations on access limits and confirmed will call activation requirements

From testing, we learned a few new insights and verified the following:

Vendors sometimes use a different order placement platform that our customers place their orders through. The customer selects a courier (Airspace in this case) and adds in their Airspace account info to fulfill the shipment. The vendor then handles setting up the shipment with that customer's Airspace account.
Customers would prefer to limit routing options for their vendors, but would be comfortable with keeping the default option (which was "fastest"). Vendors indicated they would not be toggling with routing either, as they already had procedures agreed upon with the customer.
Vendors did not need access to full order details after placing an order-- only to limited tracking information.
Customers confirmed they have will calls orders that they want their vendors to activate.

The top two insights were out of scope for the project timeline. To wrap up the project, I worked with the developer to tweak tracking information access and finalize the designs for our MVP release.

Conclusion

Final Designs

What shipped: Three flows built to give customers control and vendors a clear, limited path to placing orders

New flow to add the “Order Placer” role

A split button separates the process of adding in “authorized rep” roles (order placers, and eventually will call activators) from adding in standard company users. I built this as a reusable design system component.
The flow has detailed legal terminology and a description of the new “order placer” role's permissions.
Adding an order placer triggers onboarding materials that are emailed to the vendor and a notification to account managers.

Centralized page to switch between company accounts

Vendors can easily switch between any company accounts from a single page. New-time users are given an onboarding guide.
A persistent banner shows which company account a vendor is currently signed into. We already had issues with customers not knowing which sub-accounts they were signed into and wanted to avoid this issue with vendors.

Revised order placement process for the "Order Placer" role

An onboarding guide walks new order placers through the order creation process. This directly addressed customers' concerns about vendors navigating the account/sub-account hierarchy they might have and placing orders on the wrong account.
To maintain account security, the option to save an address to the account's address book via checkbox was removed.
During order creation, order placers can never see pricing. As customers have differing rates, this was both a business and customer need to maintain account security.
Upon submitting an order, the order placers get a tracking link by email. They can then stay up to date on the order without seeing full details, also to ensure customer account security.

Results and Impact

39 orders were placed through vendor users across 4 company accounts in the first month of release

After working with development to put on the finishing touches for the new vendor feature, we released it at the end of July 2023.

Our sales team leveraged this feature as a differentiator to unlock aerospace deals, while our account management team simplified processes for vendors managing multiple Airspace customer accounts.

Reflection

Speed forced trade-offs, starting as early as with primary research

Pushing for more research earlier in the project

After discussing the project with the team, we felt the scope was well-defined and decided to rely on stakeholder insights, as it's often challenging to get customer access. More generative customer research upfront could have better aligned us with user needs and informed priorities, avoiding later discoveries that were deferred to future releases.

Working with a time constraint

Working within the constraints of a six-week timeline added complexity. It required constant communication to prioritize and determine what was essential for the MVP. Balancing these constraints with scoping discussions ensured we stayed focused while delivering a viable solution.

Involving my team at every step of the way

Including the product manager and developer in nearly every stakeholder meeting and feedback session was invaluable for streamlining updates within the short time frame. This approach reduced misunderstandings and helped incorporate scalability into design and development based on new insights.

Next Steps

Will call activation is still highly requested by vendors

Given this feature was deprioritized, I'd want to ensure support for will call activation for vendors was developed to expand opportunities for more order placement from our customers and our vendors.

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