A tool to help designers communicate their manufacturing needs with factories

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Maker’s Row is a marketplace that connects designers (referred to as “brands”) with factories in the United States. After several successful years in operation, the feedback we began to get from factories was that while they appreciated the number of leads that they were getting from the marketplace, many of them were unqualified.

The marketplace did include a request for quote form that provided a structured way for brands to provide the information most likely be be beneficial to factories. Heat map and click map analysis of this form however, indicated to us that users weren’t making it all the way through this fairly long form.

Initial usability tests showed an increase in user understanding of the form, and after the feature was deployed analytics showed an increase in the number of fields that were being completed per form.

Layout exploration

Based on the results of our research, the priThrough a series of user interviews we learned that often novice designers and brands looking for a factory were overwhelmed by the length of the form, didn’t see the value in filling it out, and were at times unsure of what to write.

A Guided Experience

In this iteration of the request for quote form, we introduced the use of a progressive disclosure format in order to provide users with manageable chunks of information, examples of how to complete each of the sections, and editorial content from the Maker’s Row’s blog to help explain the “why” behind each of the sections that the users were being asked to complete.