Amazon.com: Fulfilled by Amazon

The Fulfilled by Amazon team is one which manages the system that third-party sellers use to manage the inventory they sell on Amazon.com.

Unified Shipping Workflow

The problem

This project was driven by both changing business needs within Amazon and feedback from sellers. The two main goals were to increase revenue by minimizing inventory movement between warehouses and to simplify a shipping process that was seen as very complex by its users.

The work

My work for this project required a full user-centered design approach. This involved:

  • User research
  • Market and competition research
  • Building use-cases, personas, and scenarios
  • Diagraming existing task flows
  • Building wireframes, mockups, and clickable prototypes
  • Conducting usability testing
  • Contributor and stakeholder collabroation

I adopted the USW project when I started work at Amazon, continually worked on it in parallel with various smaller projects, and handed it off upon my departure. A version was released to a limited population of sellers in order to gather deeper usage metrics. Before leaving Amazon, I collaborated with other team members on how to greatly reduce the work and time needed for sellers to complete their tasks.

The outcome

Unified Shipping Workflow One of the prototypes built for usability testing can be seen in the "Examples" section for this project.

A few of my achievements from this project were:

  • Reducing the number of steps to ship inventory from 14 to 6, but possibly down to 1 step
  • Built inline guidance to better assist users and help reduce the number of support calls
  • Designing the first usability test conducted in the Fulfilled by Amazon program
  • Introducing three new design patterns for wider usage across Seller Central platform
  • Driving adoption of AxureRP Pro, which lead to a design process that allows for quicker iteration and more frequent usability testing

Examples

  • Click-through prototype

    • This is one of the click-through prototypes built in Adobe Fireworks that was used for this project's usability study.

ASIN Guidance

The problem

Sellers on Amazon had a difficult time knowing how to optimize the quantity of products they sent to Amazon warehouses, which resulted in missed opportunities or incurred storage costs.

The work

As a way to help sellers optimize their product inventory throughout the year, our team started designing & building a system that would use historical and seasonal sales data to compare and calculate predicted sales forecasts. These predictions would be presented to sellers on their Dashboard, while they were building a manifest shipment, and in reports where they could dive deep into the data that impacts their business.

This project was time-sensitive, so design contributions were expedited. These included:

  • Some user research
  • Building mockups and a clickable prototype of Dashboard items, integration of recommendations in the shipping process, and deep-dive reports.
  • Delivery to stakeholders, along with future recommendations.

The outcome

An example of what a seller may see if inventory was low ASIN Guidance

Additional screens can be seen in the "Examples" section for this project.

Examples

  • ASIN Guidance mockups (PDF)

    • Here is a collection of the mockups that represent the final designs and various places where sellers would find ASIN Guidance information.

Usability testing

I was the first person in the Fulfilled by Amazon department to initiate a usability test. After designing tasks for the first study, I designed and conducted 3 other studies for different projects. I developed a document that gave any UX designer a guide to developing, designing, conducting, and reporting a quick and meaningful usability study within the FBA environment.

Resources

  • Usability study guide

    • This is the guide that I developed for anyone within FBA to use when they want to intiate a usability study.