UX Design Intern
Worked on the enterprise/retailer teams at KeHE Distributors during my internship
Interaction design, UX design, UX research
Sketch, InVision, Jira
KeHE is a natural foods distribution company. They have 19 distribution centers across North America, and work with over 8,500 brands (like KIND Bars and Blue Diamond Almonds) to distribute their products to over 30,000 retailers (like Target, Publix, and Walmart).
They also specialize in curating smaller, trendy, organic brands and giving them exposure. KeHE has a large suite of software tools for retailers and suppliers to place orders, track shipments, and much more.
As a UX design intern, I designed various features and pages on KeHE’s enterprise platform, which would be used by sales representatives at KeHE to manage orders and shipments. I also worked on projects on the retailer platform, where retailers could get an overview of shipments to their stores, and browse products.
Sometimes, retailers may no longer want to receive a certain item that KeHE would be shipping to them. Or, KeHE may not want to ship a certain product anymore. However, if this item is listed in multiple different shipments, it can be challenging to make sure that retailers won’t be receiving it.
So, we designed a solution, on KeHE’s enterprise platform, which could solve this problem - a way for sales reps to delete specific items from multiple shipments for retailers.
Starting from the “manage shipments” page of KeHEConnect, KeHE's enterprise platform, the sales representative would go to the already existing filter panel.
Here, a new argument called “containing items” is listed. The user can input the items in question here with their ID numbers (which the user would be familiar with).
From there, all the shipments containing this item are shown - this is a quick and easy way to get an overview of all the shipments that contain the items in question which need to be edited. Selecting the requested shipments, then the action button would bring up the “delete items” option
This modal would then pop up, allowing the user to see each filtered out item and every shipment they appear in, with the ability to select and bulk delete the items.
For the second design, we housed the feature in the “options” button on the top right. From there, the user chooses the “bulk delete” option.
A modal then opens up, guiding the user through the process. They first input the items that need to be deleted.
Pressing “continue” moves on to seeing each instance of the item in shipments. The instance of each item in each order can then be selected to delete.
With the product manager, we made the decision to launch this, the second, design. The wizard-like guided walkthrough of the process felt much more intuitive, especially since it simplifies and visually represents a task that can get very complicated once many different shipments and items are in question.
Of course, brands want to get their products on shelves and sell them, and by supplying to larger stores through KeHE, this goal can be accomplished. This also benefits these retailers as they can find new, trendy products to stock their shelves, making store customers happy. Retailers finding these new, unique, products is a win-win, so a space for these brands to advertise these goods, as well as their story, can be very beneficial.
I designed a template for a “store page” section for brands to advertise their products and background to retailers (supermarkets, etc) who might be interested in adding new goods to their inventory.
Here, I created an example store page for the brand KIND.
The “General” tab provides information about the brand, its identity, and some main products at a glance. The mix of space for text, images, and interactive elements allow for retailers to get a quick yet thorough overview of the brand and its offerings.
The “products” tab allows the user to view all the products the brand offers, with the ability to easily browse with different product types.
All key product information can be shown with a single click in a quick-view modal, informing retailers about details that are important for distribution.
This feature, the brand store page, provides another level of engagement and benefits for partners that KeHE works with, giving KeHE a leg up. On top of just distribution, KeHE can now act as a space for retailers to explore lesser known brands that KeHE offers, with the possibility of adding new, trendy products to their shelves. This would also satisfy customers of these stores. These new products can be thoughtfully selected by browsing this useful store page. Working with smaller, unique, and trendy brands is what makes KeHE stand out, so I wanted to tap into this identity and make it even more accessible with this feature.
I designed a help center for retailers to reference when using and navigating KeHE’s platform. It can help find and describe any feature they might need.
The help center has a few main topics, each listed clearly with a quick description to help clarify more complex topics for new users.
When reading about a topic, the other main topics can be quickly jumped to with the navigation panel on the left, so a specific feature can be found quickly. Each topic has accordion-style FAQs for common processes.
The nature of distribution, especially for food, comes with a lot of moving parts and information that is needed to keep handy. For this reason, a help center is greatly beneficial for partners who need to get situated in KeHE’s platform to oversee and manage the many business processes that come with the industry.
My responsibilities at KeHE were a unique challenge for me. Until this point in my design career, I had been focusing on consumer-facing interfaces that people like me would use. Now, it was my job to design interfaces for professionals within the company that needed to accomplish very specific tasks.
The nature of this company meant that these interfaces need to convey a lot of information (shipment numbers, order costs, warehouse IDs, etc) on a single page. Designing interfaces that contained so much information and niche features, while still being user centered and easy to understand proved to be a challenge, but I persevered, and learned so much from this experience, while my skills improved drastically.
My perspective on design as a whole changed as well. Working at a decent sized company, I began to understand the bigger picture, how design is ultimately for business. For example, at KeHE, creating intuitive spaces that are easy for our partners to manage the distribution of their goods, makes them want to keep working with KeHE. A good experience leads to customer retention, and therefore, KeHE does well.
