Every day, millions of shipping containers and their contents are moved around the world across land, sea, and sky. To keep track of shipments and goods, retailers use specialized software designed for use in warehouses. The client, a wholesale retailer with 800+ locations worldwide, was seeking to modernize their warehouse management software with a completely custom solution to increase efficiency and save costs.

Over the course of several months, I led a design team to discover and document warehouse employee workflows, create a design system, run product visioning workshops, and educate the client on agile methodology.

We successfully delivered a fully functional warehouse management system that is currently being piloted in several warehouses and set the foundation for additional features for the system to be scaled up.

Expertise:

• Design team leadership

• Design and Agile Methodology evangelism and client education

• UX design and research

Project Details:

• Client: International wholesale retailer

• Role: Design team manager

• Timeframe: 5 months

Key Collaborators:

• Adam Ott

Challenge

Modernizing a tried-and-true system with minimal impact to familiar workflows

The clients’ warehouses were running a system built in the 1980’s, an archaic but reliable system that has served them well for many years, but with a few notable drawbacks. It was very challenging to train new employees who were not familiar with the old-fashioned command-line-style interface, it was difficult to update, and functional limitations led to employees frequently making work-arounds with pen and paper, leading to losses in productivity.

Example of current system being used by employee

One of many detailed user flows

Despite the challenges with AS400, the warehouses were already running in a highly efficient manner, with innovative workflows that have made the client a household name in wholesale retail in the US. Our goal was to craft a system that would not require employees in each functional area to re-learn any workflows. In order to learn how all these moving parts came together, the team and I dove headfirst into the world of warehouses and got familiar with the whole system from inside-out!

For the scope of our work, the functional areas we covered were:

• Appointments

• Trailer check-in and check-out

• Receiving

• Sorting

• Shipping

Approach

To observe and document the workflows at the various functional areas, the team and I split up to different areas of the warehouse to shadow employees. Over the course of a few days of shadowing, we gathered dozens of photos, pages of notes, and videos. Most interesting to me were to various paper-based work-arounds that were created to fill gaps in the system.

Re-Approach

While the functional team on the client-side began building user flows, the design team created a scalable navigation layout and design system with basic components for desktop and mobile formats (for Zebra handheld scanner devices running Android).

Soon, the team was creating wireframes. With the design system, we were able to quickly move into UI mock-ups.

However, we began running into issues with the user stories. The sprint cycle kept on running into roadblocks with validating requirements, which led to the design team getting blocked. As it turned out, just observing employees and learning their workflows did not translate into robust, design-ready user stories. The client’s functional team was new to Agile methodology, and needed more support to be successful, so we decided to take a pause to re-assess the project scope and needs.

The typical design team workflow and how the teams collaborate

Product visioning workshops pave the way for a clearer future

Over the course of a week, the project leadership and I led a series of visioning workshops to level-set on the scope of the project and deep-dive into each of the functional areas. Armed with several big whiteboards, I facilitated discussions with the clients’ functional team and subject-matter-experts to define Happy Path and Unhappy Paths for each functional area. We then did high-level sketches of key screens. Having all this information made visible helped align all stakeholders and gave the design team more solid requirements to work from.

One of many whiteboards

Since the week-long visioning workshops were not initially part of the project timeline, I also re-worked the design team timeline to account for the change in scope as well as an extension of the engagement. By forecasting the future sprints, I was able to keep the team on track and balance workloads. For the first few months, I tracked work with 3 pods. For the next 2 months, I tracked it by individual designer as the sprints started to overlap and each designer had more ownership and deeper knowledge in specific functional areas.

Design

A versatile and robust system that follows UX best practices

Outcome

By the end of the engagement, the designs were in production and being prepared to be piloted at several new warehouses overseas. In addition to delivering the design work, the team and I were training the client functional team on the Agile process and working with UX. After several months, the client team was successfully writing user stories that the design team were able to pick up with minimal revision. Additionally, I was responsible for mentoring a UX designer on the client side and was able to build her confidence to the point where she felt comfortable taking over as design lead once the Deloitte design team rolled off the project.