If-Then-Else Strategy Builder
2020-2023
Pricing is an art. No two retailers do it alike, so I designed a flexible system that can get as unique as you need it to be.
2020-2023
Pricing is an art. No two retailers do it alike, so I designed a flexible system that can get as unique as you need it to be.
Wiser Solutions wanted to open up a new revenue stream for existing customers by building a dynamic pricing engine for online retailers. It needed to be able to price tens if not hundreds of thousands of items at a time for a single retailer, and to do it real time. Pricing is an extremely complex task, and I needed to build something flexible enough to handle customers at every scale.
The Strategy Builder is a flexible, customizable interface that allows users to create pricing strategies to fit their unique business goals. It works by setting conditions to select products in a customer’s catalog to reprice, then setting dynamic rules that respond to market fluctuations automatically.
This is an extremely complex product, requiring months of research, years of iteration, and weekly user testing and feedback meetings. It was a zero-to-one product where I was the only designer where I oversaw the Discovery and eventual rollout process.
Early wireframes of potential solutions focused on a few common pricing strategies, using a few set triggers familiar to any online retailer. The main problem with this initial approach was that it was too rigid and had to address more complex or nuanced customer needs. To address this, I added the option for the user to create a custom strategy.
This became the new direction for the product: a no-code If-Then-Else builder that could be infinitely flexible. This was the lightening bolt of inspiration needed, and I quickly mocked up some designs to go test them with users.
The back-of-napkin sketch I based the design on.
The first Strategy Builder prototypes taken into user testing.
The early user testing was frenetic. I was talking to customers several times a week, collaborating with an incredibly talented full stack engineer to make rapid changes to the prototype on a weekly basis. Our iterations cycle was constant, letting us hone our product rapidly before release.
Our product team conducted weekly user testing for years, making small tweaks as needed or taking notes of new features that may solve customer that were discovered during usage of the product in market. For new features, I conducted fly-on-the-wall interviews: I gave the users a task, dropped them into a UI mockup of the product using dummy data, and let them work their way through the solution.
Building great rapport with our users gave us the insight we needed to be able to add features like adding And/Or clauses into conditions, setting guardrails, and changes to the layout. One of the biggest changes was separating the information into four distinct steps instead of bombarding the user with a wall of text.
The product was designed to be no-code, human readable, so nailing the language was key to making sure that users were sure of the actions they are taking. I worked with our marketing team to get more input on the copy. This took a few testing and tweaking iterations to get something that our customers were happy with.
The V1 of the product saw immediate success, landing over $500K in contracts upon release. Over time, it made sense to roll this product up into a larger pricing intelligence product that Wiser acquired. This product is currently used daily to price millions of separate product listings all over the world, from Fortune 1000 companies to mom and pop retailers.
Though I’m no longer the design lead, I was able to hand the work off to a very talented designer whom I manage now. She continues to grow and change it, and it continues to land Wiser new contracts.
In retrospect, I would have started out by designing the Custom Calculations feature from outset. It is the feature that drives the most new business but was the last feature to get added, so we ended up losing out on a few Fortune 500 companies who were really interested but we didn’t have the feature set to be able to accommodate their needs. I ran the demos in all of those sales calls, and I can now say that we would be able to fulfill their feature requests at this point, and it would’ve been a massive boost for the company and for the product.
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