User Experience Support for the BBG e-Shop

The Federal Procurement Agency (BBG) is the buying provider of the public authorities in Austria. With their contracts, the BBG provides approx. 1,5 Mio products and services to the administration. By bundling requirements, the costs can be reduced by 18%.

The BBG’s clients are not only federal agencies, but also each one of Austria’s federal states and every third Austrian community. A big part of the state-owned organisations, universities and health organisations take advantage of BBG’s contracts and services. In 2016 the BBG reported procurements of 1,34 Billion Euro.

Introduction of the BBG e-shops

Buying portal, information portal, billing portal – the e-shop is more than an online catalogue shop of Austria’s public authorities. Alongside the possibility to order and product information, you can find information about the contract and the whole process from ordering to administrating e-bills.

Thus, products and services can be bought more efficiently and guarantees the public procurement law. This reduces costs and increases the transparency in professional buying.

To reach these high business and law requirements on a modern buying and information portal, the BBG has revised an operational concept with a new design.

A selection of improvements and new functions:

• New design and operational concept meeting modern standards
• Easier hierarchical search in bids, contracts, catalogues and products
• Intuitive information processing for contracts and catalogues
• Easier buying processes
• More information about our suppliers
• Extensive possibilities of analysis

All benefits of the e-shops can be used not only from the procurement of BBG contracts. The e-shop also offers to administrate the client’s contracts and electronic catalogues. Thus, extensive approaches for improvement unfold by reducing the channels of buying, standardised processes and an increasing transparency of the whole operative procurement process. These are the fundaments to manage all the various challenges successfully and efficiently.

Support in e-commerce analysis and development

In close co-operation with the BBG team, USECON chose a mix of quantitative and qualitative User Experience & Customer Experience methods in early stages of the project to collect actual experiences of the BBG clients and to develop strategic User Insights for the future e-commerce system. Various context interviews with clients were executed, an e-commerce best practise analysis was done and a strategic segmentation workshop together with the project team was planned.

Built on these results, Personas for the new e-commerce portal were developed as well as first drafts of storyboards and prototypes in various Experience Reviews were evaluated in detail. The focus lay on subjects like the search function, easy and quick navigation and the use of interaction elements.

The BBG e-shop has been a role model for more than 10 years in public procurement and stays one through constant further development of the buying portal with which our clients and suppliers can optimise their processes. To enable intuitive operation, despite increasing functionalities, was the big challenge within this project. To hire USECON as a partner and specialist in User Experience was one of the most important decisions. The speed of the project managers to understand and include all challenges and specialities of procurement, was a major factor to the success of the project.

Christof Bräunling, Senior Project Manager Consulting & E-Procurement