Procore’s Bid Management Redesign
The Project Details.
Company
Procore Technologies
My Role
Senior UX Designer
Team Members
Allen Kim (Senior Product Manager), Ashton Doulabi (Engineering Manager), Marcus Bernales (Staff Engineer), Luke Nispel (Engineer), Eric Liu (Senior Engineer), Kevin Plaut (QA Manager), Michelle Turner (Product Marketing), & Zach Buchman (Research).
The Background.
In construction, the bidding process is the primary way general contractors invite subcontractors to bid on work the general contractor wants to subcontract out. General contractor’s contract out the majority of work to subcontractors, so the bidding process is an incredibly integral part of a construction project. This process allows general contractors to hire subcontractors at a competitive rate.
In 2018, Procore customers sent out around 2,530,000 invitations to bid. This presents a tremendous opportunity for Procore to create a user-friendly experience for new and repeat users by making sure their first interaction with us is a great one. We frequently hear that subcontractors have had a difficult time using our product, which has caused unnecessary support calls, frustration, and low adoption of the bidding product.
With this redesign, we have added helpful features, a new intuitive experience, and many ways to track progress, adoption, and areas for continued development. So rest assured that we are watching, and we will continue to bring delightful features to the people.
Why a Redesign?
The bidding product was one of Procore’s first products launch back in 2008. As we all know very well, technology and products change rapidly. And the Procore Bidding product had not had any significant updates to it since 2008. Also, a few robust point solutions have popped up and have begun to gobble up some of our market share in the preconstruction space. Our customers began to ask for the "easy-to-use" and "delightful" features these other solutions had. Lastly, when looking at our analytics, the adoption of our tool was very low.
Why we did a redesign:
Leadership had decided to sell bidding as a stand-alone product SKU -- No longer would it be bundled in a product package
The bidding product had not had any significant updates since 2008
Competitive point solutions began to offer a better product, which our customer where switching to
Our design team wanted to implement our new design system into a product to validate
Our engineering team needed to update the code (BE needed to become "API First" & FE needed to move everything into React/SPA)
The Research.
Our team set out on a one-month research effort to make sure that we were accounting for our wide range of customers' needs.
Baselined our current usage metrics to be able to compare after release
Define success metrics
User journey mapping with clients
Internal support team interviews about product
Competitive analysis
Below are a few images that captured the research effort.
Identifying the Scope.
Creating a bid package is the very first experience GCs interact with Procore’s bidding tool. As the primary touchpoint in the tool for activating a casual user into an active bidding user, the team identified both qualitative and quantitative usability improvement areas to make the bid package experience better for GCs.
Main workflow of the bidding process
Let’s Look at Some Designs.
The Before and After
Watch the Walkthrough Video.
What Defines Success?
Bid Management has always been part of Project Management Essentials package SKU until Q1 2019. Since a significant majority of our customers already owned Bid Management, we believe our north star success metric of the product is Adoption (Enable entitled customers to conduct bidding workflow through Procore rather than a competitive solution).
As we separated Bid Management from PME for customers to purchase, we believe our secondary north star metric for success is revenue. To support optimizing for adoption and revenue, we believe that improving the product’s Engagement, Retention, and Customer Happiness will help us achieve our goals.
So What’s Next?
We are continually investing in the Bid Management Product at Procore. In its first year since launch, we overachieved our ARR targets by 127%.