Material Supply is a marketplace that leverages technology to provide the lowest possible pricing to industrial buyers like contractors, municipalities and private utility operators.
Material supply approached us at the start of their journey with an idea that needed a solid product design for the go-to-market strategy. As a complex product that streamlines material ordering across the construction industry, the founder had numerous UX problems that needed solving. From elaborate scheduling to product recommendations, a UX process needed to be executed that presented clear solutions to the challenges. Competing against key players, they needed a world-class UI to help differentiate in the market and give them strong leveraging power to scale up.
Additionally, as part of onboarding the first customers, Material Supply needed a website that clearly articulated their solution as a new player. The product and brand needed to convey trust and enable them to build initial traction while simultaneously speaking with investors.
We proceeded with an initial 12-week engagement to design the product from scratch, working through the UX double diamond process to learn the space, understand user motives and translate those into solutions optimised for the market. We build solid foundations for the design solutions by defining a structured information architecture and looking at user journeys that well-facilitated the material ordering and scheduling process. Design thinking was centred around balancing the function of SaaS and the buying experience from eCommerce to build a platform that’s both a tool and an online store.
After delivering the polished product designs, we re-engaged Material Supply to work on their website to support the go-market strategy. From ideating which problems the copy needed to be written around to defining relevant information, we built the website from the ground up. With laser-focused messaging, brand-led visuals and a scalable WordPress CMS, Material Supply is now well-positioned to develop its initial sales pipeline.
Our main focus with material schedulign was to empower the user to choose materials based on lead time, price and popularity. Enabling them to see at a glance the best materials for their consturction project. Using a sidebar to preview materials, enables users to quickly scan through products and make fast comparissions.
Looking at the strengths, weakness opporunties and threays provided a clear indusator of which featrures to push forwards to diffrentiate Mateiral Supply.
Devising a conversions-led marketing website was a clear objective to facilitate inbound leads as Material Supply increases traffic. The visuals uniquely fit around the brand image and the architecture communications value adds of the product.
With a complex product architecture, we built solutions first non-digitally on paper to explore potential options. Then moved to digital to flush out initial ideas and bring the user journeys together. Numerous ideation sessions were carried out to devise screens that solved user problems but maintained the desired ease of use.
To enable future releases of the product to be faster, we componentised the product in a design system, enabling there to be a single source of truth.
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