Royal Dutch Gazelle has been making the highest quality, most comfortable, lightweight bicycles and electric bicycles for more than 125 years. For this major bicycle manufacturer, I designed the complete dealer portal from concept to delivery.

My agency was hired by Gazelle to create a new version of their B2B webshop. Their current bike repair portal was quite old and clearly lacked a good user experience. Due to these usability issues, the portal was not widely used by the end-user.

The business objectives were clear. A more efficient, effective, and user-friendly ordering process. Until now, bicycle mechanics mainly ordered through their account managers and sometimes even by fax. This required a lot of manual work that they would like to see automated. In addition, there was great pressure on the customer service department. They also wanted to reduce the number of phone calls with the new portal by offering more online services and information.

Once the business goals were clear, I went on an investigation together with Gazelle’s product manager. We interviewed several bike dealers to find out what functionality they would like to see. Ideas for easy return of parts and placing complex orders with multiple parts were born then.

In the ideation phase that followed, I worked together with Gazelle’s in-house team on the first sketches for a new platform. From whiteboard drawings to clickable wireframes. When we had finished the first prototype, we hired an external research agency to test this with dealers. From usability testing to eye tracking. Observing users provided very valuable information that we used for further design iterations and to adapt the information architecture.

Another challenge was the technical complexity and feasibility of Gazelle’s backend. Before we started, I mapped out the challenges and technical limitations. At that time, this was not yet set up to be easy to link with a user interface. I worked closely with their engineers to realize web services and other technical adjustments that were necessary to realize the user’s needs.

In several iterations over the course of a year, I worked with Gazelle’s tech, product, and marketing team to build the dealer portal. We went back to the bike dealers several times to test if we were still building the right product for them.

After a successful launch, we continued to monitor via analytics and other data whether all processes were running smoothly. We also saw that the number of customer service reports did indeed decrease. In the years since I have worked on many features that have made the tool even more user-friendly. In addition, the portal has been rolled out to other countries in Northern Europe and I have been able to develop a similar tool for other Gazelle brands, including Union.

• UX/UI Design
• Leading discovery phase
• Connecting the dots between product, engineering, and marketing
• Research: User interviews and usability testing
• Assessing the technical feasibility