Simplifying Furniture Procurement for Design Teams
In large-scale design projects, managing the purchase and delivery of furniture can be chaotic. Designers are often too busy to document every specification, and procurement teams rely on scattered tools like Zoom, Miro, and Excel to stay on track. Furniture Folio is a web app I designed to centralize this process—helping procurement teams monitor budgets, track deliveries, and stay aligned with design goals, all in one place.
Role
UX-UI Designer
Time
6 weeks
Team
1 Lead, 1 Designer
Responsibilities
User research , Stakeholder interviews , Taxonomy, Content strategy, Wireframing, High-fidelity UI design
Tools Used
Figma
Firefly
Figjam
Lyssna
Miro
Figma Slides
Approach
I focused on clarifying communication gaps and building a tool procurement teams actually want to use. Instead of digitizing Excel, the goal was to rethink the workflow from the ground up, starting with how information is shared, tracked, and used in real-time.
Research Goals
Understand how procurement teams currently manage furniture orders
Identify bottlenecks in communication between design and procurement
Determine essential data points to track (e.g., quantities, ship dates, budgets)
Explore ways to reduce reliance on manual tracking tools
Process
Research Methods
Workflow Mapping
Workflow mapping based on current tools (Zoom, Miro, Excel)
Affinity Mapping
Affinity diagramming to identify repeated pain points.
User Interviews
Stakeholder interviews with 6 procurement specialists and 4 designers
Competitive Analysis
Competitive audit of procurement and project management tools
User Persona
Based on user interviews, I created user persona.
UNDERSTANDING WORKFLOW BETWEEN DIFFERENT USERS
User Persona
I created user flow for the overall website keeping in mind user and business needs.
How might we?
Starting with solving procurement needs
Starting with procurement needs, we focused on improving their experience first because solving their challenges would, in turn, reduce friction for both project managers and designers. By streamlining procurement workflows, we could ease communication gaps, minimize delays, and create a more efficient system for the entire team.
UNDERSTANDING PROCUREMENT WORKFLOW THROUGH STORYBOARDING
UNDERSTANDING THE WORK STEPS HELPED SHAPE THE STRUCTURE AND FLOW OF THE PRODUCT
Impact
40%
Estimated time savings in weekly
procurement reporting.
60%
Potential to reduce miscommunication between teams