Redesigning the supplier portal so sourcing stops falling back to email

Suppliers barely used the system for sourcing, which created three concrete problems.

No audit trail. Quoting and negotiation records lived in email, leaving compliance audits with no system of record.

No data to build on. Without system records, there was no foundation for a price library or historical benchmarking.

Manual overhead for buyers. Batch-sending emails and tracking suppliers manually was pure human cost.

A broader study of the full procurement platform surfaced sourcing as the area with the most complaints. But “bad experience” is a symptom, not a designable problem, so I went a layer deeper.

The team split into groups playing buyers and suppliers, walked through the full sourcing flow, and logged every friction point. I tagged and clustered the issues, and they converged on four areas: Homepage, Detail Page, Quote Form, Negotiation Form.

End-of-flow issues had limited reach. The homepage was the supplier's first landing point. A Task Center there could surface every stage, so suppliers would know exactly where they were the moment they logged in. Coupa and Oracle both take this approach.

While walking suppliers through the demo, I found an unexpected fact: most suppliers log in via temporary accounts, which land directly on the sourcing detail page. The homepage is skipped entirely. The page we were optimizing was invisible to the majority of users.

The entry point had to be reframed.

The old invitation email was plain text, with key information buried in paragraphs and looking like spam.

I did three things to fix the email itself: rebuilt the information architecture to surface the essentials, refined the visual hierarchy so the primary action was obvious, and reviewed every subject line for clarity and scannability.

Then I turned the redesigned email into a reusable template covering different email types and procurement teams, so every future communication starts from the same foundation.

The detail page had to show both sourcing info and legal terms, and legal required the full terms to be visible. I separated the two so sourcing info came first, and legal terms had to be scrolled to 100% before the checkbox could be ticked. The design satisfies compliance while keeping sourcing content from being buried.

The old page exposed two CTAs side by side (Confirm Participation, Submit Quote). Suppliers didn't know which to click and often clicked neither. But there was a real business need behind this: buyers needed to know how many suppliers intended to participate early, so they could decide whether to expand the invite pool.

I hid the Quote button until after the participation deadline and added context telling suppliers that confirming intent does not lock in their quote, lowering the cost of action.

Drawing a progress bar sounds simple, but the prep work was real. I mapped the full sourcing flow from scratch so the bar could accurately reflect where each supplier stood.

The Task Center framing was logically sound and the ROI analysis held up, but the actual user path looked nothing like what I'd reasoned out. It's easy to substitute your own mental model for the user's. Validate with real data as early as possible.

Users often can't articulate what they want, but once they see a real design in front of them, they'll immediately tell you what's wrong. It's a habit we got right on this project.