Walmart Sustainability
Designing a Learning Hub to Enhance Business Sustainability Practices. Centralizing information for Suppliers to improve their practices.
Internal Team
UX Designers (Team of 3) · UX Manager · Product Managers · Developers · Tech Managers · Business Representatives
Role + Tools
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UX Designer · Facilitator · Lead UX Researcher
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Figma · Excel
Key Contributions
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Applied research insights to implement data-driven design enhancements.
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Orchestrated usability testing to identify current deficiencies.
Background
What is Walmart Sustainability Hub?
The Walmart Sustainability Hub is a destination for Walmart suppliers to access resources and learn about opportunities to collaborate with Walmart, they can join initiatives or review case studies and best practices to inspire and improve their sustainability journey.
What is Project Gigaton?
Project Gigaton™ is an initiative announced by Walmart in April 2017 which aims to inspire suppliers to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the global value chain. Walmart wants to encourage suppliers to participate in Project Gigaton™ by setting targets to reduce emissions across six critical areas: energy use, waste, packaging, transportation, nature, and product use and design.
Team Objective
The team and I aim to reducing support costs and improving report submission efficiency.
Walmart relies on its suppliers to report emissions annually in the Sustainability Portal. However, many suppliers struggle with this due to sustainability knowledge gaps and scattered support materials. This leads to numerous help desk tickets and delays in report submissions, significantly increasing costs during survey season.
The team and I addressed these issues by conducting user interviews, multiple design iterations, extensive usability testing, and creating a detailed hand-off file for developers. As a result, the team and I connect Walmart suppliers with comprehensive sustainability learning content, tools, and resources to improve their sustainability practices.
Process
Bridging Knowledge Gaps: Enhancing Supplier Sustainability Processes
Suppliers faced significant challenges in grasping the complexities of sustainability requirements. To pinpoint these knowledge gaps, the team and I conducted extensive user interviews and collaborated closely with business, product, and engineering teams to explore front and backend processes, tools, and roles. Drawing insights from these efforts, we identified critical use cases and iteratively refined our designs, culminating in a comprehensive hand-off file
Collaborative Solutions
Through our collaboration, we identified and remedied process inefficiencies, addressed pain points, and pinpointed opportunities for system improvements.
Outcomes
Enhancing Efficiency and Community Impact
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Our solution provides a centralized location for content about sustainability topics: Energy, Waste, Packaging, Transportation, Nature, and Product Use & Design, and Project Gigaton reporting. This tool is designed in a learnable format style to make comprehension easier for the user.
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This tool helps the business reduce the amount of support tickets and increase supplier’s engagement and knowledge.
Additionally, for my contribution on this project, I was recognized and awarded with a prestigious Walmart's Making a Difference Award for spearheading operational excellence initiatives with this project.
Reflection
Lessons Learned: Innovating Tools for Efficient Business Practices
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I gained deeper insights into the sustainability industry and its complexities in implementing enhanced business practices.
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In our next phase, our focus shifts to developing a tool that streamlines supplier reporting on sustainability measures.
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Additionally, I discovered that smaller organizations are eager to adopt best practices from larger counterparts to enhance their sustainability efforts.
Testimonial
It was a pleasure working
with Jenny on the multiple projects
at Walmart Global Tech. Most recently,
I worked with her on Walmart Project
Gigaton. Jenny was a significant contributor to the team. She began with conducting user research to better understand Walmart suppliers.