Background
ASI’s platform, ESP, has evolved through multiple iterations over the past 30 years. Originally launched as a CD-based product sourcing system in the late 1980s, ESP has grown into a fully online application accessible on both desktop and mobile, serving suppliers and distributors in their daily business operations. With each iteration, ASI has expanded its user base and transitioned existing users to the latest version of the platform. Over time, these users develop habitual behaviors and tend to adhere to their established workflows, regardless of the version they are using.
Challenge
Our platform serves a diverse range of distributors, from individual distributors to corporate customers Each of these distributors have used a different version of ESP and will have different needs. Ideally, we would engage with every customer type, but due to constraints, we focused on our core distributors who actively use our most current platform. Since corporate customers have unique needs and additional features that differ from the standard experience, we chose to exclude them from this study.
My Role and Reponsibility
Methodology
To recruit participants, we established criteria focused on distributor behavior and their interactions with our ordering system. Specifically, eligible participants needed to:
Complete at least one order within the past year.
Demonstrate active engagement with the platform during the past year
Use the most updated version of our platform.
We prioritized participants using the latest version because new potential customers will start there. Since the previous version is no longer offered—and many users have already been migrated—we aimed to understand the experience that will have the most significant impact on our users. To ensure a comprehensive perspective, we also requested a list of participants with varying levels of experience, from companies of different sizes, and with backgrounds using the previous version of ESP. Given that the ordering process involves multiple steps and distributors may enter at different stages, our goal was to capture a holistic view of the overall platform experience.
We received a list of 300 users who met our criteria and conducted a two-week recruitment campaign. As a result, we interviewed eight distributors—five from our core audience and three from our corporate audience. Since the corporate users has a different set of features and experiences compared to our core , we excluded their responses from the dataset below.
To guide our interviews, we created a discussion framework focused on how distributors use the platform to fulfill their order needs and the challenges they encounter. Our questions were designed to explore the underlying reasons for their behaviors and to understand why they might skip certain steps. Each interview lasted between 45–60 minutes, was transcribed, and documented in Miro for further analysis. To keep the conversation on track, we broke down the order process into distinct sections with targeted questions. Some of the questions we asked included:
What part of the order process causes you the most frustration, and why?
Which part of the order process do you focus most of your effort on, and why?
Can you walk us through how you typically introduce an order to your client, and why you share specific information with them?
What could we add to the current order process to enhance your experience with it?
Upon analysis, we identified common patterns in our distributors' responses that led to the creation of two distinct personas. One persona represents the new promotional product user who has exclusively relied on our latest platform and fully utilized its offerings. The other persona reflects seasoned distributors with over five years of industry experience who have used at least one previous iteration of ESP, resulting in a unique set of experiences and feature expectations.
Reflection and takeaways
While our platform supports a diverse range of users, developing distributor personas was an important first step in integrating user-centered thinking into our design process. These personas will be shared across the organization to provide valuable user insight—supporting both marketing initiatives and design decisions communicated to the development team.
By narrowing our focus to a specific user group, we were able to create more detailed and actionable personas that will guide future design efforts.
With additional time for recruitment and interviews, we could further enrich these personas to better reflect the full range of distributor behaviors and needs.
Incorporating corporate users into our research will introduce more complex and diverse use cases, which—while adding design challenges—will ultimately enhance the experience for both corporate and core users.