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| Role | Product Designer |
|---|---|
| Company | Risk Ledger |
| Focus | B2B SaaS, search UX, data quality, supplier networks |
| Tools | Figma, Cursor, Linear, Metabase, Log Rocket, Mixpanel |
| Scope | One squad, two-week appetite |
| </aside> |
Risk Ledger’s supplier network depends on clean organisation data. But clients were frequently creating duplicate supplier profiles because search did not make existing suppliers easy enough to find.
A small input mistake, a missing space, “Limited” instead of “Ltd”, or a slightly different company name, could cause users to miss the correct supplier and create a new profile instead.
At the time, there were 839 known duplicate supplier profiles. That made this more than a search-quality issue. It was a data-quality problem, a network-growth problem, and a trust problem.
My role was to lead the design work to make organisation search more forgiving, more consistent, and harder to misuse, while keeping the scope small enough to ship inside a two-week squad appetite.
Duplicate supplier profiles weaken the value of a supplier network. They fragment supplier history, reduce confidence in search results, create operational clean-up, and make it harder for clients to connect to the right organisation.
The product was letting bad data enter the system at the exact point where it should have been prevented: supplier search and creation.
| Business risk | Product symptom | Design opportunity |
|---|---|---|
| Duplicate supplier profiles | Users failed to find existing suppliers | Make search more forgiving and results easier to trust |
| Lower connection quality | Users connected to or created the wrong organisation | Show clearer metadata and relationship status |
| Weak observability | Team could not confidently measure search quality | Add tracking around search, creation and connection behaviour |
| Confusing discovery model | Multiple search surfaces behaved differently | Create a more consistent organisation-search pattern |
The strategic shift was simple: search should not just help users find suppliers. It should protect the quality of the network.
Supplier discovery had grown across multiple surfaces, each with slightly different rules. There was a search modal, a “Browse all suppliers” page, an “All suppliers” page, network visualisation tables, and supplier-side client search.
From the user’s perspective, these all looked like ways to find an organisation. But under the hood, they represented different data models, different result sets, and different actions.
The design discussion showed that “Browse all suppliers” was largely compensating for limitations in the search modal, rather than serving a distinct user need. If the modal could support full result sets, scrolling, clearer metadata, and creation fallback, then a separate browse experience became much less necessary.