The Story
I redesigned Willow Drive’s 20-year-old inventory management system, eliminating reliance on paper and third-party tools while improving workflow consistency and efficiency. By conducting on-site research, mapping process flows, and prototyping new solutions, I streamlined data entry, improved inventory accuracy, and gave users greater visibility into their operations, allowing them to respond faster to customer needs.
Willow Drive had been using the same inventory management system for almost 20 years. The system had a steep learning curve given the custom workflows that had been implemented over the years and users were still having to supplement with paper workarounds for certain tasks. It also meant there were inconsistencies across the application, making it difficult to move from one part of the application to the other.
As part of the discovery process, I conducted a two-day, onsite visit to assess their current system, primary tasks and user groups. This involved a thorough assessment of their workflows, environments, and interviews with their office staff. This helped us to identify gaps in the current system, and well as advocate for new functionality based on their underserved needs.
During our on-site visit, I found their users were relying on paper and many third-party solutions like Word and Excel to complete their tasks. This meant there were many opportunities for our new system to help alleviate some of these gaps. By migrating their data to our application, this also allowed us to create better checks on accuracy and help identify problems faster than the old system allowed, creating more efficiency in their process.
Given the highly complex nature of each users workflow, I created detailed process flows to represent the paths through their current system and help optimize the flows in our redesign. This helped our team to visualize the pain point, isolate those areas where users were relying on supplementary systems, and prioritize our work to ensure we were accounting for the primary use case in each instance.
Since we were creating new workflows in many cases, it was important to build early prototypes in order to validate our design decisions with users. This allowed us to quickly identify solutions that either did or did not work for our users. Additionally, by closely watching their interactions, we were able to identify areas where the user could customize the flow for themselves, to make the work more efficient, while designing an interface intuitive enough for new users to onboard quickly.
Since we knew this would be a system that would slowly evolve over time, it was important to put in place clear ui guidelines regarding the design and interactive behavior of the application. We learned from the old system that there was a definite need for ensuring consistnecy in design and behavior moving forward. As a result, I created a style guide for the application for use in future iterations by design and development.
The final design helped to increase the overall efficiency of data entry for Willow Drive's primary users. It also allowed them to work exclusively in the application without having to rely on third-party or paper supplements, and improved the accuracy of their inventory counts as well. By having the entire process in one system, we were able to give them greater visibility into their inventory, as well as allow them to react more quickly to the needs of the customers.
