Making a critical business tool work harder
Sam’s Club’s Commodities Platform helped merchants track market prices, but usability issues were pushing users toward alternative tools. I led research and a focused UX redesign to make pricing data easier to understand and everyday workflows more efficient.
SCOPE
End-to-end
Research • Design • QA
TEAM
8 global
& cross-functional
Before
After
The challenge
Despite its importance to merchants’ workflows, the Commodities Platform wasn’t the preferred destination for commodity pricing information.
A heuristic evaluation, competitive research, and interviews with five merchants revealed three key opportunities:
Improve clarity: Make pricing information easier to scan and interpret.
Increase control: Simplify chart interactions, date ranges, and saved commodities.
Improve consistency: Use familiar patterns and terminology across the experience.
With just one month to deliver, I needed to prioritize the improvements that would make the biggest difference.
The solution
01: Simplify pricing at a glance
I redesigned the pricing card to make current prices, units, and comparison periods easier to scan.
02: Make trends easier to explore
I brought chart and table views together with clearer frequency and date-range controls, giving merchants more flexibility in how they explored historical pricing.
03: Give users more control
I designed configurable settings and more flexible download options, including currency, decimal precision, frequency, and custom date ranges.
From design to delivery
With a tight timeline and a global cross-functional team, alignment was critical.
I created a feature-prioritization matrix and facilitated a workshop to align on scope, dependencies, and implementation priorities. I then supported development with detailed component documentation, prototypes, and user stories, followed by visual QA in staging.
Outcomes
The project reinforced two lessons: involve engineering early, and define feature complexity during discovery.