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. The 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 assumed users would search only a few items, but research revealed they often manage hundreds or thousands, shifting my focus to bulk actions, scalable views, and efficient interaction patterns.

Usability Testing

I partnered with our UX Researcher to run early usability tests, which validated assumptions, revealed blind spots, and guided refinements.

Search Design ITERATIONs

We focused on search by learning which filters and attributes users rely on most, then streamlined the interface to highlight those and cut unnecessary complexity.

Action ITERATIONs

We explored the most common actions around managing selling status, uncovering frequent use cases and related attributes. These insights shaped more intuitive bulk actions and prioritized the most relevant fields in the workflow.

Final Design

Searched Items Final design

Key design decisions from user feedback included prioritizing critical details with clear column hierarchies, adding flexible interactive elements, using progressive disclosure to simplify complex workflows, and integrating the enterprise design library for consistency and efficiency.

Final Thoughts

Coming from Nordstrom’s Smart Markdown project, I brought familiarity with pricing and selling workflows, which gave me a deeper understanding of team dynamics and business motivations.

Challenges

• Tech Relationship: Large tech teams drove the design pace, often prioritizing speed over feedback. I learned to balance user needs with development timelines, building strong relationships to keep both moving forward.

• Documentation: With requirements often shared verbally, misalignment was common. I created a centralized digital space for UX, Research, and Content teams to track decisions and maintain alignment throughout the project.