ASI’s platform, ESP, has evolved through multiple iterations over the past 30 years. Originally launched as a CD-based product sourcing system in the late 1980s, ESP has grown into a fully online application accessible on both desktop and mobile, serving suppliers and distributors in their daily business operations. With each iteration, ASI has expanded its user base and transitioned existing users to the latest version of the platform. Over time, these users develop habitual behaviors and tend to adhere to their established workflows, regardless of the version they are using.
Our platform serves a diverse range of distributors, from individual distributors to corporate customers. Ideally, we would engage with every customer type, but due to constraints, we focused on our core distributors who actively use our platform. Since corporate customers have unique needs and additional features that differ from the standard experience, we chose to exclude them from this study.
Process
To recruit participants, we established criteria focused on distributor behavior and their interactions with our ordering system. Specifically, eligible participants needed to:
Complete at least one order within the past year.
Demonstrate active engagement with the platform during the past year.
Use the most updated version of our platform.
We prioritized participants using the latest version because new potential customers will start there. Since the previous version is no longer offered—and many users have already been migrated—we aimed to understand the experience that will have the most significant impact on our users. To ensure a comprehensive perspective, we also requested a list of participants with varying levels of experience, from companies of different sizes, and with backgrounds using the previous version of ESP. Given that the ordering process involves multiple steps and distributors may enter at different stages, our goal was to capture a holistic view of the overall platform experience.
We received a list of 300 users who met our criteria and conducted a two-week recruitment campaign. As a result, we interviewed eight distributors—five from our core audience and three from our corporate audience. Since the corporate users has a different set of features and experiences compared to our core , we excluded their responses from the dataset below.
To guide our interviews, we developed a discussion guide focused on how distributors use the platform to meet their order needs and the challenges they face. Our questions aimed to uncover the reasoning behind their behavioral patterns and why they might be skipping certain steps. Each interview lasted 45–60 minutes, was transcribed, and documented in Miro for further analysis.
Upon analysis, we identified common patterns in our distributors' responses that led to the creation of two distinct personas. One persona represents the new promotional product user who has exclusively relied on our latest platform and fully utilized its offerings. The other persona reflects seasoned distributors with over five years of industry experience who have used at least one previous iteration of ESP, resulting in a unique set of experiences and feature expectations.