Partfox — Manufacturer & Buyer Dashboard

The issue of the before

Both profiles had grown outdated and frustrating to use, though the pain played out differently for each user.

For Manufacturers: managing their own data was the frustration. Machinery, contact details, certifications, and performance stats each lived in a separate card, spread down a long page — updating or reviewing anything meant hunting across sections rather than seeing it in one place.

For Buyers: the frustration was a lack of visibility into activity. RFQs appeared as a flat list — title, status, date — with no sense of how manufacturers were actually responding, so gauging interest or engagement meant opening each request individually.

Buyer Dashboard — Solution

To find the real root of the problem, research combined three sources: Mixpanel data on buyers' top interaction points, a survey campaign built with marketing to surface pain points directly, and interviews with customer success and sales — the teams closest to buyer complaints.

All three pointed to the same gap: buyers had no single place to see how manufacturers were responding to their RFQs. The new dashboard fixes that — RFQ feedback with interest breakdowns (interested / pending / not interested), a manufacturer list organized by relationship, and top-matched manufacturers, all in one view.

Impact, 3 months post-launch:

• +30% buyer engagement with the app

• Became a sales talking point when pitching prospective buyers

• Fewer support complaints from buyers about finding manufacturer RFQ feedback

Incomplete manufacturer data

Beyond usability, this fragmentation had a business consequence. Manufacturers frequently left profile data incomplete — and an incomplete profile meant poor positioning in the platform's search engine, making that manufacturer effectively invisible to buyers searching for their exact capability.

Caption: First login (or incomplete profile) now leads with a guided checklist — "Just 6 more steps to get listed" — turning an empty state into a direct nudge toward the data that drives search visibility.

First fix: prompting completion

The first problem addressed was this visibility gap. After registration — or whenever a profile is incomplete — the manufacturer is now pushed to complete their data before anything else.

Not Every Widget Survives

Reaching this layout meant designing and testing far more widgets than made the cut — Profile Strength, Visibility Score, RFQ status cards, and profile-completion nudges were each iterated on individually before approval. The result is a set of modular widgets, not one fixed layout, so performance data, RFQ activity, and completion prompts can coexist without competing for attention.