UX RESEARCH CASE STUDY
From Friction to Roadmap
| My Role: | Lead UX Researcher |
| Company: | The Home Depot |
| Project: | Call for Price (CFP) B2B Internal Pricing Tool |
| Timeline: | 8 weeks (from planning to final readout) |
| Methods: | End-to-end flow design, SMS UX, stakeholder communications |
| Participants: | 24 internal users, 6 external vendors |
| Deliverables: | Research readout, journey map, tactical and strategic UX opportunity framework tied to department OKRs |
The Challenge
Home Depot's Call for Price (CFP) feature is a critical tool that Pro Account Sales Associates, Pro Account Executives, and Complex Quoting teams use to build quotes for large professional customers. CFP allows associates to source and price products that aren't listed in the standard catalog, making it essential for closing large, complex jobs.
Despite its importance, CFP was quietly creating significant friction across every user segment. Associates worked around broken features. Complex Quoters relied on improvised workarounds just to get their jobs done. Vendors had purchase orders rejected or go missing entirely. The system was holding people back, and the business hadn't yet fully quantified the cost.
Who is using CFP, why are they using it, how are they using it- and what short- and long-term improvements would make the biggest difference?
$1.6M
Lost sales from PO rejections
30 hours
To complete one large project quote for a $550K, 200+ line-item job
Methods
This required a mixed methods approach- pairing interviews and direct observation with analytics to connect what users said with what the data showed. The study included 24 internal users and 6 external vendors across all key segments.
| Method Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Qualitative |
Internal Users
User interviews with Pro Sales Associates, Pro Account Managers, and the Complex Quoting team.
External Users
Vendor and supplier interviews to capture the fulfillment-side experience.
|
| Quantitative |
|
User Segments Studied
Usage varied significantly across segments, which meant the research needed to hold multiple user perspectives simultaneously:
| User Segment | Usage Rate | Primary Need |
|---|---|---|
| Complex Quoting team | 64% of orders | Pricing flexibility, bulk ordering, truckload management |
| Pro Account Managers | 16% of orders | Access to products outside the standard catalog |
| Pro Sales Associates | 10% of orders | Better pricing and quantities for large Pro customers |
| Vendors and Suppliers | Fulfillment-side | Flexible product assortment without full catalog maintenance |
Key Findings
| 1. CFP is essential and irreplaceable CFP is not a workaround or an edge case, it's load-bearing infrastructure. For Lumber alone, 91% of orders run through it. Removing or deprioritizing the feature would directly halt sales. | 2. CFP lacks guardrails The feature has no meaningful validation or error prevention. Users routinely entered the wrong unit of measure, category, or model numbers, often without any system feedback. These weren't user errors so much as design failures. |
| 3. Associates are succeeding in spite of the system Users had developed a rich set of workarounds, using CFP as a bypass when catalog search failed. This signaled that the system had created a gap wide enough to require improvisation at scale. | 4. The 30-hour problem Journey mapping the Complex Quoting workflow surfaced the study's most striking finding: a single $550K project (two buildings, 200+ line items) required approximately 30 hours end-to-end, spread across multiple rounds of manual data entry, vendor follow-ups, and document review. |
From Insights to Action
A key responsibility was ensuring research didn't just describe problems, it had to give the product team something they could act on immediately. Recommendations were structured across three horizons, with placement determined by effort-to-impact ratio and team capacity, and each horizon was mapped to department OKRs to keep prioritization grounded in business outcomes.
Impact and Reflection
The research readout was delivered to product, design, and business stakeholders in June 2024. Immediate next steps were identified across three horizons- now, next, and future - including a prioritization workshop and Lean UX Canvas creation for near-term enhancements.
What I'm most proud of in this work is the way research shaped the narrative that leadership used to make decisions. The 30-hour journey map wasn't just a compelling visual, it was the moment where an abstract conversation about usability issues became a concrete case for investment. The $1.6M in lost PO revenue gave the vendor friction story the business stakes it needed to be taken seriously.
Good research doesn't just answer questions. It gives stakeholders the right language to prioritize. On this project, that meant translating user pain into time, money, and a roadmap.