Engaging suppliers to respond to orders

Overview

Dozr is the largest equipment rental marketplace connecting suppliers with contractors. I tackled one of the biggest business problems at the time: suppliers weren't responding to enough orders in time. I redesigned Dozr's main touchpoint with suppliers — the monthly report emails.

Research & problem discovery

Suppliers get 10 minutes to respond to an order before it expires and goes to another supplier nearby. This was hurting suppliers, contractors, and Dozr alike.

1:1 interviews revealed the core issue: suppliers didn't recognize the value of incoming orders, treating the notification tablet as background noise.

Exploring the opportunity

To help suppliers see that value, I redesigned the monthly email reports Dozr sends summarizing rental activity. One supplier, after seeing their activity laid out clearly, bought hundreds of thousands of dollars more equipment to rent out.

Other directions considered

• UX: extending the 10-minute timer, giving suppliers a second chance, redesigning onboarding.
• Engineering: a dedicated mobile app, fixing bugs affecting the experience.

The redesign

I set the target audience (senior managers at rental companies) and success metrics (click-through and response rate), then designed against Nielsen's heuristics: match system to the real world, stay consistent with existing patterns, keep it minimal, and favor recognition over recall.

Sketching

I iterated through several data-visualization approaches to highlight key stats, landing on a minimal, compact version to iterate further.

Refining

High-fidelity iterations combined minimalism, familiar terminology, and a single central focus, validated through guerilla testing and stakeholder review.

New design

Because it's an email, every detail — spacing, terminology, hierarchy — went through several rounds of scrutiny.

Technical implementation

The original report took days to build by hand, so I worked with marketing and engineering to automate the entire send process.

Learnings

I learned the value of designing collaboratively rather than in isolation. Next step: validate the redesign through both qualitative and quantitative testing.