Damaged Items
A mobile app and physical process for in-store employees to record and discard damaged items from the inventory system.
Key Goal
Analyze the current app and create an optimized app and workflow for store employees and managers to record items as damaged into an inventory tracking system.
Devices
iPhone App, Physical Process
Responsibilities
Research, UX Design
Original Damages App and Backroom
01. Roles & Responsibilities
For this project, I was the lead UX Architect. I worked with UI designer, business partners, and a team of developers. I was in charge of research, wireframes, and prototyping all concepts. What made this project unique is I traveled to several stores across the Chicagoland area to observe and interview in-store employees.
02. The Process
Education was key for all parties for this project. This was the first time this team had worked with UX. A large part of my time in the beginning was dedicated to educating the business on what is user experience, what my process looks like, and what to expect along the way. This project was highly technical with a lot of different business/legal processes that were involved. Before starting concepts, I had to fully understand a whole suite of interacting apps and the physical processes that took place with them.
Once I was fully onboarded, I began observing and interviewing in-store associates and managers. My goal was to learn more about who I’m designing for and see the struggles with the existing process. While in store, I was able to not only witness but experience the pain points firsthand. I compiled all my findings into an official report to present to my business partners.
Phase One
After the research was complete, this project was split into two phases. The first phase was to come up with a short term process to very quickly eliminate most of the pain points while still remaining compliant. This part of the project was on an extremely short deadline. Using the current experience, I came up with an improved user and physical work flow that would significantly reduce user frustrations and wouldn’t be a significant lift for the development team. Even though the experience wasn’t as easy as it could be, it was a move in the right direction.
Phase Two
While the developers started working on phase one, I started facilitating white boarding sessions with the business team. This was an extremely technical process that had to meet the requirements of several different teams including legal. It took several white boarding sessions to work out all of the scenarios before I could start to work on wireframing the concepts. I created user flows, wireframes, and from there began to create interactive prototypes for testing. Once it was narrowed down to two experiences, I began to bring the in-store associates and managers back in for moderated user testing. I worked extremely closely with development to properly implement all the designs.
03. Outcomes
This project was successfully released to all 36,000 in-store associates and managers in early 2019. Since the design of this project was completely documented and development was involved since the beginning of the design process, it saved the call center thousands of hours for phone calls from managers trying to resolve bugs and user experience errors. We conducted follow-up research once the app had been released only to hear how easy to learn this new process was even for new employees.
