Farnell's platform was built on consumer shopping patterns. Its customers were engineers and professional buyers, and they worked nothing like shoppers.
Premier Farnell is a global distributor of electronic components, products, and technology solutions for system design, maintenance, and repair. Operating as a subsidiary of Avnet, the company supplies engineers, developers, and businesses across dozens of countries.
more orders
internal design roles hired
months retained
A B2B platform shipping components to over 100 countries, with a roadmap shaped by consumer-style ecommerce features rather than the realities of the engineers and buyers who actually used it. UX debt was building, customer friction was rising, and the in-house design team was stretched too thin to address it.
We started by watching them work. The findings reset the roadmap, orders rose 9%, and by the end Farnell had four new design hires and a research practice that ran without us.
The platform worked the way online shops work. Browse, save, add to basket, check out. They were good patterns, but borrowed and applied somewhere they didn’t fit.
An engineer isn’t buying anything. They identify the right part and hand it to someone else, in another team, who places the order. The platform had no concept of that handover, so both people worked around it.
Engineers wanted tools to identify and pass the right parts to their buying teams, not “save for later” buttons
Buyers needed faster, integrated bulk-ordering without unnecessary consumer features
Both groups needed stock and delivery information early, and it was buried at checkout
UX debt was accumulating faster than a stretched in-house team could clear it
The impact was measurable, lasting, and built into the organisation. Orders rose 9% after the changes went in.
The bigger shift was who set the roadmap. It stopped being driven by what consumer ecommerce was doing and started being driven by what Farnell’s own customers did all day.
We also left the capability behind. Four new internal design roles were hired and developed during the programme, and the research practice runs without us.
A roadmap defined by customer behaviour rather than sector convention
Tools built around specifying and handing over, not saving and checking out
Stock and delivery surfaced where the decision actually gets made
A repeatable research practice embedded inside the organisation
01
Engineers, buyers, administrators and CEOs at technology firms across several countries, watching the job rather than asking about it.
02
Internal workshops where Farnell's own people watched customer behaviour collide with the platform's design.
03
Tools tested with the people who'd use them before anything was committed to.
04
A repeatable research practice, and support through hiring four internal design roles.
These brilliant research insight sessions get better every time. It’s so important that we understand our customers. This project is accelerating our learning and driving our innovation.
Rob Rospedzihowski, President Sales EMEA, Premier Farnell
A disciplined hunt for value — the structure to explore the unknown without the usual cost of getting it wrong.
1-hour (remote)
Bring us the thing everyone in your organisation disagrees about. We'll tell you what we'd do, whether that involves us or not.
1-day (in person)
One day won't solve everything, but it'll tell you exactly where to start. 'Too many ideas' become one clear plan with the evidence to back it.