Keelvar Rate Manager

How do you make an interface for up to 100k results and 300 custom fields easy to use?

Problem

For procurement professionals using Keelvar, an e-soucing solution, the tasks they face on a daily basis can be highly specialised, labour intensive, and can require a high cognitive load. As an example, lets take rate management. In mid sized to large businesses, procurement teams have various methods of storing the agreed prices for contracts, in what is called a Rate Card. For context, a contract could be a price for a shipping container of raw materials going from Southampton to Cork for the year. Initial customer interviews revealed that procurement teams were struggling with fragmented systems, labor-intensive manual processes, and inefficient rate tracking and reporting, sometimes at very large scales of many thousands of contracts, and hundreds of custom fields.

Solution

These challenges highlighted a clear gap in the market; a need for a centralized platform to manage, monitor, and search rate data easily and efficiently. Keelvar was positioned exceptionally well for addressing this, as it already stores rates inside it's e-sourcing events. The challenge was to put these into a new user friendly product that could become a source of truth for agreed contracts.

I began by exploring low-fidelity concepts, centering the design around a familiar tabular interface inspired by Excel, as this was the most familiar interface for our users. However, we aimed to go beyond Excel by incorporating powerful features like advanced filtering to facilitate managing vast rate cards - some with up to 100,000 rates.

After multiple rounds of iterations on prototypes, validating high level concepts with customers, a development team was assembled. I worked closely with engineers to ensure technical feasibility of designs. AG Grid was chosen to power the rate table. I also contributed to front-end QA, leveraging my technical background to test in-app designs before deployment. After launching the alpha version, I led think out loud user testing sessions with customers, internal stakeholders, and non-expert users, uncovering critical usability insights before launch.

A year after release, Rate Manager now integrates seamlessly into existing workflows to become the single point of truth for nearly 50% of Keelvar users. Plus, it's integrated into a larger solution, where AI agents autonomously negotiate and store rates on behalf of customers.

This work was created at & is property of Keelvar.

UX research - facilitated early customer interviews to determine if the project should be greenlit.

Validated ideas and identified areas for improvement before launch, conducting multiple internal a customer user testing sessions.

UI design and competitor research - established a look and feel for tabular interface.