Overview
Searching Manufacturers:
Matching Buyers with the Right Manufacturing Partners.
Lead UX Researcher | Founding Product Designer
MakerSharks was building a platform to automate the manufacturing supply chain, connecting Class 1 medical device buyers with the right manufacturers and suppliers. Our discovery research revealed fragmented sourcing workflows, leading us to introduce a GenAI-powered search that unified discovery and helped buyers quickly find the right partner and initiate production.
Problem
Our initial research found that buyers were discovering manufacturing partners through fragmented channels which resulted in the following problems:
Tedious Search
Buyers rely on fragmented channels, taking months to find manufacturers.
Conferences
Web browsing
Checking with their network
Credibility Issues
The goal of the buyer is to get the manufacturing partner who can provide:
Manufacturing Quality
On-Time Delivery
Budget friendly quotes
Medical Device compliant certification
Opportunity
How might we help buyers quickly find the potential partners and evaluate manufacturers ?
Competitive Analysis
We realized searching manufacturers depends on the business model.
Fictiv lets user create a RFQ and gets quote from real manufacturer to the buyer.
India Mart functions as a supplier marketplace similar to Amazon, where a simple product search with filters suffices.
Design Workshop
Conducted design workshop to decide initial features.
The design workshop was conducted for the entire product to map the MVP roadmap.
Design Goal
The manufacturer search must achieve these goals to be considered successful:
Empower Buyers
Develop a buyer-driven search experience that captures the inputs needed to retrieve relevant data from the database.
Trust
The search experience should establish manufacturer credibility upfront, reducing the need for vendor presentations and scheduling calls.
Quick Decision Making
Streamlined search that quickly surfaces relevant manufacturers and recommendations to speed up decisions.
The First Iteration
We created low fidelity prototypes to test with users to see how buyer criteria translate into effective search results and to learn about the preferred user flow.
Drop BOM/CAD file
Creating a Project
Search for manufacturers
Search for Manufacturers
Shortlist manufacture
Creating a Project
Insights
Different Buyers, Different Evaluation Needs
Testing with low-fidelity prototypes showed that experienced buyers relied on product-specific criteria, whereas novice buyers struggled to determine how to evaluate manufacturers, highlighting the limits of fixed filters.
User Need:
We shifted to a generative search approach that dynamically adjusted filters based on the product being sourced.
Business/product Need:
To create a smart search and capture search information to pre-fill the rfq generation , reducing manual effort and accelerating the sourcing workflow.
Outcome
Search inputs were reused to pre-fill RFQs, reducing manual effort and accelerating the sourcing workflow.
Putting it all together
Combining all the feedback and created an improved design concept that was picked my 80% of the participant.
Navigation
Created by Riddhi Madeka 2026 | All rights reserved