Quartzy is an application created by two doctors when they realized how chaotic life-science laboratories are.
Many labs were still using whiteboards and inventory spreadsheets. Quartzy was built to modernize these experiences, later expanding to include a shop.
Increase orders placed with Quartzy.
Our customers are creating orders, but are potentially missing out on the benefits from ordering from us.
Increase purchases made through Quartzy.
Customers should be able to understand what Quartzy offers, and (ideally) buy from us based on that information.
Do no harm. No complaints, no wrong items.
No customer support tickets about incorrect purchase from the changes we introduce
Quartzy operates on quarterly OKRs during which pods had to balance multiple product priorities.
The timeline was four weeks for discovery, design, and development to launch to a select group of customers.
As the Lead Designer and Researcher, I interviewed customers to understand their workflows, observe their behaviors, and to create something they trusted, understood, and that demonstrated our business value.
During the design process, I gathered stakeholders (CEO, VP of Product, and Engineering Leads) in order to keep everyone updated.
Once we reached a decision, I worked with the engineers to get our solution implemented and in our customer’s hands on-time.
The same product is identified in many different ways, and most researchers didn’t realize this.
When a researcher puts in a request for an item, they don’t want to risk their experiments failing because one item was slightly different.
Many were wary of any unfamiliar items, and this design needed to convince them when these items were actually the same.
In short:
Researchers were missing out on items we had that they wanted, sometimes for a better price, quicker delivery, in small quantities, etc.
In-lab observations and feedback
Researchers:
Multitaskers balancing experiments all over the lab.
Would see that an item was low, rush to their desk to request it, and quickly return to their experiments.
Rarely at their desk longer than the time needed to request an item.
Lab Managers:
Handle administrative tasks, deliveries, and ad-hoc verbal requests for items.
Review and approve requests to keep the lab supplied. They were constantly interrupted, making it difficult to complete tasks.
When a researcher asked for an item, Lab Managers were very reluctant to override the request.
I proposed a design based on the following:
Catch users at a critical moment: right before submitting a request.
Easily scannable information, where they are already looking, as obviously as possible.
Engineering needed the user’s product information first. With this and performance in mind, we could show our identical item best here.
Paired with a bottom banner, I aimed to catch quick-scrolling users looking to return their experiments ASAP.
We were able to implement our changes, launch to a subset of labs, and monitor the effects.
After 2 weeks of a positive trend we launched to all labs and were able to meet our key result for this project.
The increase in sales held up throughout the remainder of the year, indicating that our changes had a lasting impact.
Increase purchases of items through Quartzy
Isolating the data for this flow we saw a >5% increase in Quartzy selection, meeting our key metric.
Do no harm. No complaints, no wrong items.
We saw no new tickets related to this feature. Of the orders placed, the items surfaced were of the same expected quality, and created repeat orders signaling item satisfaction. Users, at first, took more time on this page to review the new design. After initial exposure, this design did not slow down or confuse users workflows or orders.
Design & Engineering Improvements:
Reformat request table; remove extraneous elements
Faster loading times
Improve Visual Design System
Opportunities I saw:
How could we use this for multiple requests?
Could we pre-select items based on lab behavior?