Vendor Intelligence, Ecommerce, and Startup Work

The range

My ongoing independent work runs alongside contract engagements. It spans ecommerce, SaaS, consumer products, and early-stage startups: Persefoni, CallFire, Sysco, Farmers Insurance, Cooking.com, Mistbox, Frog Fitness, Luminess, and others.

The work is varied by nature. The piece worth describing in detail is Riemer.

Riemer Group

Riemer builds vendor intelligence software for large outdoor retailers (REI and companies like it). Their product gives buyers visibility into the vendors they purchase from: ratings, payment history, contact records, contract status. It exists so a retailer does not commit to a vendor who will not pay their bills or has gone quiet, and it facilitates the payment process itself.

It is, functionally, a trust layer between large retailers and their supply chain.

The ask, and what it became

I was brought in to redesign their homepage. I did that, and in the conversations around it, it became clear that the more consequential problem was elsewhere.

Their internal software, the actual product, was dated and difficult to use. They asked me to reassess it, and that became the real engagement.

The finding

The system had the problem most data products have out of the box: it showed everything.

All available data, surfaced at once, with no hierarchy and no point of view about what the user was actually trying to decide. That is a common default and it is not a neutral one. It pushes the entire interpretive burden onto the person using the software.

The work was applying judgment to that. Which data supports the decision being made. What gets surfaced, what gets buried, what gets charted, and what the chart is actually utilized for. I drew heavily on my data work at ExxonMobil, where the same problem existed at a much larger scale.

Outcome

The redesign shipped internally. Feedback came back positively from Riemer and from their clients - REI among them - specifically on usability.

It is the engagement I would point at as evidence that I sit between data, design, and development rather than in only one of them.