Simplifying routine inventory counts
Vision, Alignment, Contextual analysis, Experience design, Interface design, and validation for AWNC
Client
AWNC
Date
Q3 2018
Role
Lead UX Design, Visual Design, Interaction Design
Length
6 weeks
One of the daily tasks for employees at the AWNC warehouse is to update the counts of inventory they store for a client. Each of the stores of inventory are labeled with a location and a Kanban code, and most locations also display a barcode version of each of those codes as well.Prior to our contract, the employees have been manually writing down the location, kanban code, and count on paper, and handing that over to office staff, who then manually enter that data into spreadsheets or other inventory management systems.The goal is to overhaul this process and eliminate any manually written processes.
The final deliverable for the project was a deployable application that the in-house IT team at AWNC could install on a set of Android powered barcode scanners.
This engagement prioritized speed, simplicity and ease of development by the client’s in-house IT team. Therefore, the UX portion of the engagement was kept to the minimum number of hours possible, and the resulting designs were required to stick as close to vanilla Material Design components as possible.
I worked as the sole designer for this project, alongside two developers and a project manager/BA.
AWNC kindly walked the team through the warehouse to see how the inventory was stored and to discuss the methods the staff uses when counting.
I facilitated a remote meeting to hear the client's thoughts on their problem and their plans to resolve it. This lead to my team and I traveling to their location to see the actual bins that get counted every day.
I determined a user flow based on conversations with a manager at the warehouse. Once the basics of the flow were nailed down, I mocked up the flow in Sketch and prototyped in Figma.
After two rounds of feedback, we settled on a final design for this first round of development. The below prototype is what my dev team built and tested on the scanner devices. The app is now being used in the warehouse every day!