Strategic and conceptual design for one of the Netherlands' largest B2B platforms.
Bol Partner Platform
UX Strategy · Concept · 2022–2023
Project under NDA portfolio shows anonymised work
Bol is the largest e-commerce platform in the Netherlands and Belgium, with a vast network of third-party sellers at the core of its marketplace model. Rapid platform growth had put seller satisfaction and NPS under pressure. The B2B partner platform where sellers manage their business on Bol needed to evolve to keep pace. A key challenge was that the platform served sellers at very different stages of their journey, from newcomers finding their feet to established partners scaling their business. A one-size-fits-all approach was no longer sufficient. Before solutions could be designed, the challenge needed to be properly understood.
Brought in as a freelance strategic design consultant, I led the discovery and definition phase.
This meant conducting internal interviews, synthesising data from customer service and analytics, building personas and mapping customer journeys to identify the platform's most significant pain points. From there I translated findings into conceptual frameworks, platform flow improvements and a seller dashboard redesign, presenting solutions to stakeholders throughout. I collaborated with a team of 5+ designers and developers to ensure concepts were grounded and ready to carry forward into implementation.
Working as an external consultant inside a large organisation with multiple stakeholder layers and competing priorities is a specific kind of challenge. There is no existing trust to lean on and no institutional shorthand. You have to earn alignment through the quality of your thinking and the clarity of how you present it. Facilitating workshops, presenting to stakeholders and creating frameworks that could hold the weight of many different perspectives required as much strategic communication as design craft.
Process
The project began with a thorough research phase, building on existing user research within Bol and making it more concrete through personas and customer journey mapping. Internal data from analytics and customer service played a central role in grounding the work in real seller behaviour and pain points. From those insights, I prepared and led a series of workshops to define design directions, solutions and priorities together with the internal team. The end result was a full concept for a flexible new framework for the partner platform, designed to better serve each partner at every stage of their lifecycle with Bol.
Results
The conceptual phase concluded with designs that directly addressed the platform's most significant user pain points and were enthusiastically received by the internal team. I handed over a clear direction and solid foundations for the next phase.
Credits
Tools used:
Figma (Jam)
Miro
TheyDo
HotJar
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