Selling Manager

Streamlining Selling Rules and Product Attributes

PROBLEM STATEMENT

“I need to easily look up items and manage their selling status across all banners (Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack) at once, especially when a product has been discontinued.”

Today, users rely on multiple disconnected tools to manage product data, which leads to inefficiencies and confusion. The challenge is to design a unified interface that allows users to view and manage key item attributes—such as sellability—seamlessly in one centralized system.

Research

AUDIENCE

The primary users are members of the Digital Ops team, who currently receive large Excel spreadsheets—sometimes with hundreds or thousands of product codes—to manage the sellability of items. They need an efficient way to update the selling status for individual products or in bulk, as well as manage other key selling attributes.

USER FLOW

To understand the current experience and identify pain points, we mapped the user flow from product lookup to selling status updates. This helped validate existing workflows and informed opportunities for streamlining the process in the new tool.

Design

EXISTING Tool

The current tool is scheduled to be sunset within the next year. Our goal is to identify the most critical attributes users rely on and deeply understand how they interact with the tool today. This includes how it fits into their broader workflow, so we can ensure a smooth transition and design a solution that aligns with their real-world needs.

Current User Pain Points

Overly broad search makes it difficult for users to narrow down relevant results quickly

Lack of clarity around sellability management, relying on coded terminology that only experienced users understand—new users face a steep learning curve

Insufficient product identifiers, making it hard to recognize or verify the correct items during search

INITIAL DESIGNS

My early designs introduced the ability to search for one or multiple products, with action toggles and editable fields directly within a table layout. Initially, I approached the design with a "happy path" mindset—assuming users would typically look up only a few items at a time. However, after speaking with users, we discovered that they often manage hundreds to thousands of products at once. This insight shifted my focus toward designing for one-to-many relationships, prioritizing bulk actions, scalable data views, and efficient interaction patterns.

Usability Testing

With a dedicated UX Researcher on our team, I collaborated closely once the initial designs were ready. Together, we developed key tasks for an early gut check and gathered feedback through user interviews and usability studies. These sessions helped validate assumptions, uncover blind spots, and prioritize refinements.

Search Design ITERATIONs

One of the first areas we focused on was the search experience. We started by asking users how they typically look up products—do they actually use all the filters provided in the current tool? Which product attribute do they search by most frequently? What do their requests to manage product data typically look like?
This helped us streamline the search interface by emphasizing the most-used attributes and reducing unnecessary complexity.

Action ITERATIONs

We explored what the most common user actions are when managing selling status. Key questions included:

• What are the primary tasks users perform most often?

• When updating selling status, do they typically need to adjust other attributes at the same time?

• What are the most frequent and critical use cases?

  Understanding these patterns helped us design more intuitive bulk action capabilities and prioritize the most relevant fields and interactions within the workflow.

Final Design

Searched Items Final design

Key design decisions driven by user feedback included:

• A clear information hierarchy with prioritized column headers to surface the most critical product details

• Defined interactive elements that give users control and flexibility when taking action

• Progressive disclosure to guide users through complex workflows without overwhelming them

• Integration of the enterprise design library to ensure consistency across tools and streamline development

Final Thoughts

Having come from the Smart Markdown project at Nordstrom, I was already familiar with pricing and selling workflows, which helped me navigate this new project with a deeper understanding of team dynamics and business motivations. This prior experience allowed me to approach the project with confidence and a clearer sense of how to collaborate effectively.

CHALLENGES

Tech Relationship: At Nordstrom, technology often drives the pace of design work due to larger teams and a focus on filling development hours. This dynamic sometimes made it challenging to incorporate user feedback, as tech teams required quick decisions to keep moving forward. I had to learn to balance my design process with the need to maintain a strong relationship with developers, ensuring that user needs were prioritized without slowing down progress.

Documentation: One of the biggest challenges was the lack of clear documentation. Business requirements were often communicated verbally through my Product Owner, and decisions made in working sessions were sometimes forgotten weeks later. I quickly realized that without proper documentation, we risked misalignment. To address this, I took the initiative to create a centralized digital space for UX, Research, and Content teams to keep everything organized and ensure alignment throughout the project.