Supplier Portal Sourcing Experience Optimization
Bring critical sourcing actions back into the system
I redesigned a key slice of ByteDance's Supplier Portal sourcing experience, from invitation → participation confirmation → progress tracking, so suppliers, buyers, and legal teams had the context they needed to move forward. This increased online sourcing adoption and reduced reliance on email.
Problem
Critical info was hard to locate across a long, staged workflow, so work kept leaking into email.
Solution
Redesigned the workflow around 4 decision moments where users needed clarity to act:
- Email entry: Make invites scannable and action-oriented
- Requirements vs. Terms: Separate project requirements from legal terms to reduce cognitive load
- Participation decision: Clarify intent and remove CTA ambiguity
- Progress tracking: Make stages, deadlines, and next steps trackable
Impact
Q4 pilot: Adoption 3.9% → 19.92% (vs. 15% target); supplier satisfaction 4.91/5; stronger buyer confidence.
Sourcing leaked into email because the portal wasn't reliable
Sourcing is a high-stakes workflow involving multiple roles (buyers, suppliers, compliance, and legal). The process often fell back to email because the portal was hard to use and didn't feel reliable. As a result, status was unclear, follow-ups were easy to miss, and audits were difficult.
Buyer–supplier back-and-forth happens in email, making the workflow hard to track.
Improve usability
Reduce friction so suppliers can complete key steps without workarounds.
Improve visibility and tracking
Keep status, deadlines, and key actions visible in one place.
Build trust early
Make each step clear and predictable so users rely on the system status.
Step 1: Cross-functional workshop to align on the real problems
🎯 Objective
Align stakeholders by walking through the legacy supplier journey together and clarifying why suppliers default to email.
💪 Action
Ran a first-time-supplier walkthrough, then logged and tagged issues by journey step and type to align on severity and effort.
✅ Output
A structured issue list with tags and priorities, used as the baseline for design and engineering planning.
Issue log from workshop
Step 2: Competitive analysis - Task Center as a common entry
I benchmarked mainstream sourcing portals (e.g., Coupa and Oracle), then prototyped a lightweight Task Center and ran quick walkthroughs to gather early feedback before committing engineering time.
Task Center demo (explore direction, not final solution)
The concept helped us align on a possible direction, but it also raised a key question:
💡 Would building the task center actually change supplier behavior?
Step 3: Pressure-test the Task Center direction
Used the Task Center demo to prompt walkthroughs with suppliers and buyers
⚡️ Pivot Point
The task center wasn't the highest-leverage place to fix first, email is.
Data showed ~70% of suppliers entered from email deep links directly to the sourcing detail page, skipping the portal homepage.
Most Suppliers Skip the Homepage
What to fix: 4 decision moments in the supplier participation flow
Flow overview: Email invite → Review requirements & legal terms → Confirm participation → Track progress & deadlines
Moment 1: Email invitation received
Essentials weren't scannable in the email, so buyers resorted to manual follow-ups.
“I always end up manually re-sending the email to suppliers just to double-check that they saw the requirements.”
— From Buyers
Moment 2: Review requirements & legal terms
Requirements were mixed into long legal text, making key info hard to find—while legal still needed explicit consent before suppliers could proceed.
“The legal terms always dominate the top of the page. Can you separate the standard terms from the actual project requirements?”
— From Suppliers
Moment 3: Confirm participation
Two CTAs compete（Confirm Participation vs Respond/Quote）
“Do I need to quote now?”
— From Suppliers
Moment 4: Track progress & deadlines
Stage context unclear（“what happens after participation?”）, causing hesitation and missed actions.
“I clicked ‘Participate’, but nothing happened. Did you get my intention?”
— From Suppliers
Moment 1: Email invitation received
🎯 Users need
Understand the ask and the next step
Suppliers need a scannable summary (what this is, deadline, and where to click).
💪 Design move
I redesigned the invite email to surface the essentials and make the primary action clear.
🚀 Bonus - Build for scale
Standardized the layout into a reusable email template component for other procurement teams.
Email template for all types of emails and other procurement teams
Moment 2: Review requirements & legal terms
🎯 Users need
Review requirements separately from legal consent
Suppliers need to find project requirements fast without wading through legal text, while still giving explicit consent.
💪 Design move
I separated requirements from legal terms and added a mandatory “agree” step to unblock participation.
Moment 3: Confirm participation
🎯 Users need
Make intent explicit before asking for a quote
Suppliers need to clearly signal “I intend to participate” before they invest time preparing a response.
💪 Design move
I clarified the participate intent and removed competing CTAs so users always know the correct next action.
Moment 4: Track progress & deadlines
🎯 Users need
Track progress and deadlines at a glance
Suppliers need visibility into where they are in the sourcing lifecycle and what's due next to avoid missed actions.
💪 Design move
I visualized the full journey with stages, deadlines, and status so progress becomes trackable.
Improved online sourcing adoption and earned strong buyer and supplier feedback.
Adoption
Q4 pilot (GGP) vs. 15% target
Supplier Satisfaction
4.91/5
Supplier satisfaction score for the new sourcing experience
Buyer Confidence
All buyers
reported higher confidence in the system and said they were more willing to promote it to suppliers
Reflection 1: Validate real pain points, not ideal assumptions
I started with a reasonable assumption (a Task Center entry), but user walkthroughs showed the real friction lived elsewhere. The key lesson was to stay close to users and validate pain points with real behavior before scaling a direction.
Reflection 2: Align early to avoid costly rework
A key takeaway was how much cross-functional coordination the work required. With Legal, Compliance, Engineering, and Ops all shaping the workflow, early alignment became critical. By validating decisions before build, we avoided backtracking and kept the project efficient for R&D.