Alerts and Collaboration for Walmart Internal Finance

The problem:

Decisioning is done in silos where access to uniform data and reliance on manual processes leads to being more reactive than proactive, slowing down processes, and reducing accuracy.

The solve:

Build in-product collaboration features such as dynamic alerts/notifications and commenting to centralize financial planning and automate opportunity discovery with internal AI technologies.

⏱️ 27% faster to alert team members of potential data anomalies

✅ 68% task completion fully in-product vs other tools

Product Team

Mark - Product Manager

Matthew - Systems Designer

Juan - Product Designer

My Role

Product Designer

Quick Context

IBG (Intelligent Business Growth) is a team dedicated to designing for financial planning Web tools that are based on a broad set of enabling technology. Powered by AI and models of the Walmart ecosystem, IBG allows dynamic financial planning for a broad base of users. There are 4 workstreams (A, B, C, and D), each of which have their own characteristics but are deeply connected. While I was mostly dedicated to the workstream B (business monitoring), the project in tow affected all users under our platform, making it workstream agnostic.

My job was to explore how visual alerts and in-product collaboration could be used across these workstreams.

Alerts and Notifications

In order to concept out the initial portion of this work, it was necessary to define alerts and notifications and how they should function within our system:

  • Alerts - Visual cues intended to attract users’ attention to a particular piece of content or UI element that is dynamic in nature. They’re both contextual and conditional.

  • Notifications - Informational messages that alert the user of general occurrences within our system. Notifications can be tied to alerts or they can be related to some other event.

By labeling these, centering the work around visual alerts, notifications tied to those alerts, and general notifications became key in my initial exploration.

In Situ

Alerts and Severity

When presenting to other workstream partners, it became clear that not all alerts required the same level of urgency. While action oriented alerts still had their function within the product, some work flows saw the potential for alerts that more so acted as a visual indicator to an event vs. needing an actual action to be taken. Level of severity should be dictated by the designer on their particular workstream.

Collaboration and Commenting

When it came to how users and teammates would interact with each other, I had to consider the difference between comments made for the individual user by the user vs comments made for others. Use cases here centered around taking notes, discussions, and tracking issues or action items. I focused this portion of work around how to make single comments, replying to comments, and the different visual treatments of comments on data tables vs data visualizations.

In Situ

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