VAGARO
Purchase Orders
Enabling businesses to create custom purchase orders by both searching and filtering for products.
ROLE
Product Design Intern
TEAM
Self
TIMELINE
Jun 2024 - Jul 2024
OVERVIEW
Vagaro provides beauty and wellness businesses software to help with booking, managing employees, and inventory among many other things.
One of the many features that Vagaro offers is the ability to track inventory and to create purchase orders of necessary products that might be low on stock.
I improved this experience for clients by establishing a way to search for specific products as well as including quality-of-life changes.
00 | FEATURES
Feature Overview
01 | PROBLEM
Currently there's no way to search for a specific product when creating a purchase order.
Although businesses can filter by vendor, brand, product type and quantity, they cannot search for a specific product. Instead, they have to manually scroll through all products.
02 | UNDERSTANDING THE USER
Inefficiency drives away business.
This issue was brought to my attention when businesses started commenting about it on Vagaro's discussion forum. Businesses were fed up with the current purchase order flow and were even thinking about leaving Vagaro due to the inefficiency.
The main pain points that were brought up were:
03 | ITERATION 1
Adding a Specific Product Dropdown
The first thing to tackle was how to improve the "Create a New Purchase Order" popup. I wanted to keep the flow that businesses were used to, so I explored different options of adding a specific product dropdown to the popup.
OPTION 1: ADD A NEW PRODUCT DROPDOWN
Add a product dropdown under product type filter
Keeps the same flow that businesses are used to
Search might not be as noticeable - looks like another way to filter.
OPTION 2: ADVANCED FILTERS
Encourages businesses to search for specific products.
Open Advanced Filters to filter by brand, product type, and quantity.
If businesses are looking to filter, it might be confusing for them to have to click advanced filters.
OPTION 3: SEARCH AND FILTER SELECTION
Separates the flows of search and selection
Businesses can either choose to search or to filter
Clear and concise descriptions for either flow
Might be confusing to businesses used to the old purchase order flow
04 | USER FEEDBACK
Most businesses are not going to be specifically searching when creating a purchase order.
After talking to people who were more familiar with the purchase order process, I realized that the search functionality was only useful in specific cases.
"Most businesses aren't creating purchase orders by searching for specific products. They usually make it by purchasing low quantity products or by brand." — User A
My earlier iterations encouraged users to use the search function instead of the filters. However, most businesses realistically use the filters more often than the search.
Therefore I decided to go with Option 1, as it still prioritizes the filters over the search. Additionally, I added some minor quality of life changes.
ADDING "ANY QUANTITY OPTION"
Allows businesses to sort for any product regardless of the product’s quantity. Solves the having to select Quantity Less Than a Large Number problem.
ADD A PRODUCT
Allows businesses to combine purchase orders by adding additional items to one purchase order.
05 | STAKEHOLDER FEEDBACK
Prioritize what businesses are used to.
I created a more substantial user flow of the entire process to present to C-suite executives.
Although the stakeholders recognized the need to add a specific search, they still wanted to emphasize the use of the filters over the search. Additionally, they wanted to simplify the flow of adding products to the purchase order. Instead of having to filter again, users would just be able to search for specific products to add.
I took this feedback to iterate on my final prototype.
06 | PROTOTYPE