Summary
Waybridge is a commodity trading platform focusing on eliminating gaps in the supply chain. I began my work here as a Senior Product designer in June 2021. Since then, I've been working across multiple teams to provide a design solution for nearly every part of the platform. From creating trade to summarizing daily and monthly data in position reports.
Industry
Aluminum and copper are one of foundational industries for the US economy. However, the trading processes haven't been updated for a long time. Buyers, traders, and sellers have adopted Excel and CRM as the leading managing platform. That made each company's managing system very different from others.
Understanding the problem
This project aims to provide visibility for the movement of the material. That will improve the relationships between all counterparties and make the tracking more seamless. The schema on the left addresses the buyer visibility. However, each participant in the sale will benefit from it. Currently, the trader is struggling to show anything besides the final leg of the material journey.
Working on the solution
To work on the potential solution, I worked with the insights from the primary stakeholders: trade counterparties, services, and product teams. My goal was to, at a high level, define the main buckets of information that needed to be presented on the screen. What are the critical data points for each section, and how will users potentially interact with it?
Design & Testing
To test the design options, I worked with the Product team and conducted user testing with 5 clients. The user test included a simple Figma prototype and a set of open questions for the users. My goal was to ensure that the design felt intuitive enough. However, since it is a complex platform, I did not exclude the possibility of an educational walkthrough.
During the user, testing was essential to speak with different users from every sale step. The biggest challenge of this project was combining different viewpoints on a single task on one screen that would benefit everyone.
Final thoughts
In a world where things have been done manually for many years, it can be challenging to implement automation that meets everyone's expectations. And the adoption process might take much longer. However, it is a rare opportunity to establish new industry standards. Over a few years, I completed several features currently used by the behemoths of the metal industry.
