Perfect Channel builds intelligent B2B marketplaces for enterprise-grade clients and to-date has enabled and optimised several billions in transaction value every year.
Perfect Channel's Platform is able to give internet power to businesses in Diamonds, Art Auctions, Car Auctions, Shipping & Freight booking, trading, Real Estate, Energy Hedge Funds and more.
These businesses have different sales models like Trading, Negotiations, Online Auctions of different formats like English Forward, Reversed Auction, Seal Bid and more.
They also have multiple user roles, support multi-vendor trading and all that in a single platform which also helps its users to discover easier and faster the right price, using smart predictive algorithms.
Create and maintain a design system for our SaaS B2B Marketplace & Trading Platform.
Help with the repositioning of the company, from the perception of a software house providing auction technology services, to a company that offers an intelligent SaaS B2B Marketplace Platform.
The first thing I did, was to create a process of sharing my thinking and design methods with all the departments involved in the product, in order to gather early feedback and wisdom. That helped me solve problems faster and easier in every phase of the project.
During the product definition phase, interviews with the key stakeholders helped me understand the business challenges, goals and limitations, so I could align my effort to their expectations.
Being on the same calls between our sales people and our clients was a great opportunity for me to gather valuable feedback. I was lacking experience on the subject of trading and these interviews helped me understand more about the trader mindset. With limited time in my disposal, I had to carefully choose my questions to identify their behaviour, needs and pain-points.
Working closely with the product teams, together we formed our first hypotheses that resulted to our first user flows and journeys. We adopted a lean approach where I designed countless sketches that turned into high fidelity mockups and interactive prototypes, visualising every possible scenario of the marketplace transaction models. We introduced 4 different sales models: Negotiations, Auctions, Trading & Fixed Price.
I was sketching with my favourite pen, designing in Sketch and making prototypes with InVision. We used Abstract to sync the design team across three countries and we created a single source of truth, a design library which was the foundation of our design system.
When your product is going to be used by verticals like Trading, Diamonds, Energy and Shipping, you need information from people that sometimes you don't have access to.
So unless you have industry people that are also tech people, you can’t do it. Luckily for me, we had these people in Perfect Channel and I got the answers I was looking for.
The distinction between what is our product and when are we going off-book and create something custom, which we can revisit later and decide if it’s going to be included to our product, is very important. Simplicity and absolute prioritisation are key factors when you design for many.
I used Sketch, Abstract & Invision to create design our design system & demos for our sales team, but tools are just tools.
What counts the most is your understanding of how a design system can help your team now and making sure that it's built in a way to endure what the future holds.
Phil Bird - Founder & CEO
Ivan O'Toole - Sales Director
The new website is communicating the new messaging of the company, following the new brand attributes, from the tone of voice to typefaces & photography.
That helped us find clients who were already in need of our product and reduced the noise of customers who weren’t a good fit.
Perfect Channel’s new Marketplace Platform is helping global leaders in their respective industries, such as TMX Group, GlobalDairyTrade, Lloyds of London, Christie’s and LeasePlan ensure their marketplaces operate efficiently.
