UX / UI Design · Woolworths · 2021–Present

Next Gen Slotter

Empowering Woolworths Category Managers to make better promotional planning decisions and form stronger negotiations with suppliers — replacing fragmented tools with a unified central platform.

Role UX / UI Designer

Team Design team of 3

Duration Sept 2021 — Present

Prototype View on current site →

About this project

An innovative end-to-end central promotional management platform for Assistant Category Managers (ACMs) and Category Managers (CMs) at Woolworths to plan and slot category promotions whilst negotiating promotional plans, offers and agreements with suppliers.

Through our UX process, we identified that users' major needs are to reduce administrative burden and access all aspects of promotions — strategy, planning, calendar slotting, commercial agreements and offer execution — in one central place.

My role

UX / UI Designer across a design team of 3. Responsible for User Research, Strategy, Information Architecture, UI Design, Wireframing, Prototyping and Usability Testing.

The problem

Admin burden was preventing better decisions

Woolworths' ACMs and CMs often struggled to efficiently negotiate the best promotional plan with suppliers due to their lack of time and flaws in existing tools and processes. Copious time spent on admin — rather than on making the right decisions — was creating significant lost revenue and profit opportunities.

How do we reduce the admin burden for ACMs so they can focus on building the most optimal promotional plan?

Discovery

Understanding the user

Through user interviews with ACMs and CMs, I gathered themes and highlighted them in an affinity map — clearly defining the main users, their current workflow, pain points and opportunities.

Needs and pain points of ACMs and CMs stemmed from two common problems: admin burden and lack of time.

Affinity map from user interviews — Affinity map — insights from user interviews

Personas

ACM & CM

The initial focus users that benefit most from this platform are Assistant Category Managers (ACMs) — who spend the most time negotiating deal sheet agreements and planning promotions with suppliers. Category Managers (CMs) are also involved at a higher level as the point of escalation between ACM and supplier negotiations.

Journey map

ACM-centric journey map

ACMs' most critical pain points lie during the slotting and planning stage due to the admin burden and complexity of existing tools, and significant manual overheads required to confirm and amend deals.

The solution

A platform built around two core needs

The solution comprises two major components working together as one unified platform:

Centralised deal sheet

Stores and manages commercial supplier agreements, reflecting each category team's promotional strategy in one place.

Promotional calendar

Displays essential promotion information at a high level, with detailed data gathered from various tools for informed decision-making.

Solution overview — deal sheet and calendar — Solution overview — deal sheet & calendar

Design process

From ideation to final design

After reviewing user flows and use cases, the tool was structured around the deal sheet and calendar. Lo-fi wireframes were tested with users and iterated multiple times based on feedback.

Lo-fi wireframe — deal sheet — Lo-fi — deal sheet

Lo-fi wireframe — calendar — Lo-fi — calendar

Key design decisions

3 major improvements

Broadening view from supplier to category level

Based on user feedback, ACMs preferred to view different suppliers' products in one group to see clashing and substitutable products. Expanding the view enabled custom views drilling down to a particular assortment or zooming out to a whole category view.

Global filter expanded view — Global filter — expanded view

Moving insights to a side panel & adding recommendations

The insights feature was moved from the main page to a side panel to free screen space. A recommendations tab was added to help users decide what actions to take from the insights.

Insights panel and recommendations — Insights panel & recommendations

Catering for different ways of working

Added multiple colour schemes to show promo depth, classification, stage of progress, and price governance breaches — catering for different user preferences and working styles. Added customisable time period views for categories affected by seasonality.

Time period view — Customisable time period view

Final design

4 key features

01 — Integration

Shared promotions portal with supplier

Enables users to send promotions directly to the supplier for review within the tool — removing discrepancy risk, reducing the burden of checking financial information, and allowing easy tracking of promotion status across all suppliers.

Portal integration demo — Portal integration — supplier workflow

02 — Scenarios

Scenario functionality to test and compare

Enables users to create test scenarios in mock environments with different combinations of promotions, and compare financial information across proposals in one place.

Scenario comparison demo — Scenario comparison functionality

03 — Forecasts

Automated but editable forecasts

Eliminates manual forecasting, enabling forward-looking planning. Users retain full control to adjust forecasts based on their greater category knowledge.

Automated forecasting demo — Automated forecasting

04 — Insights

Smart insights & recommendations

System-generated insights and recommendations help users find actionable opportunities to maximise revenue and profit growth — removing the need to use multiple tools.

Smart insights and recommendations demo — Smart insights & recommendations

Reflection

Key learnings

Simple is the way to go

Users prefer the simplest way of achieving tasks. If the tool isn't easy to use, they won't use it. Users already have too many complex tools — they don't want to spend time onboarding onto another one.

Design for a scalable product

Having v2, v3, v4 in mind when designing today creates a smooth transition between versions — helping both user adoption and developer efficiency across updates.

Involve engineering upfront

Bringing engineers into the conversation during ideation helps reduce rework later. Understanding technical limitations upfront directly informs design strategy and prevents costly late-stage pivots.