Warehouse management — how to make better user experience

Photo by Bench Accounting on Unsplash

Do you know who’s behind your delivery? Can you assume what process happens after clicking the confirmation button? And how many services start running after that? Let me share quick desk study, which probably gives you some clarity and next time, if something goes wrong, you will know where is an issue.

Industry Overview

As you can imagine, delivering process includes many steps. And warehouse management is a part of a large management order system (I’ll call it OMS). It contains several tools for customer service, accounting, Point of Sales (POS), warehouse management, inventory control, picking tools, etc. The process involves many participants, starting from customers, managers, pickers, finishing the delivery workers. The highest chance to get some problems is when an order moves from one part of the system to the other. In the story, I’ll focus on the picking process and users who do this work — pickers. This part demands interaction with people, moreover, the human factor might add extra issues.

Delivery process

Problem statement

After reading various articles about the picking process, I can highlight some problems, that frequently happened in fulfillments storages:

• Pickers pick the wrong items or quantities;
• Lack of navigation in the warehouse increases the time for picking the order list. It appears a delay the order fulfillment;
• No prioritization for urgent orders during picking;
• Some pickers use printed order lists for picking. It can create a lot of errors caused by the human factor, and wouldn’t allow to update the quantity or replace an item;
• No visibility of who is assigned to the order. It means no clarity of the order status. It creates obstacles to track responsibility. Workflows should give visibility on all actions and movements and who has performed each action;
• No clear navigation in the warehouse. Often racks have no identifier to track your location in the warehouse and track where is an item. Particularly it’s a problem for novices or when the totally new items enter the warehouse;

Generally speaking, the concerns connected not only with software but also with the physical environment.

Benchmark analysis

Let’s check how other market players solve these problems. So I reviewed competitors to understand the picking process and typical workflow, solutions they are providing.

Competitor analysis

It’s not a very deep analysis, but it helps you understand the industry overlook. Follow the link to see the full version:

Warehouse - Competitors analysis

Market overview insights

So, long story short:

• Most of the solutions focus only on mobile phones. Tablets are used rarely, mostly as a fixed device near the racks;
• In-build camera or a separate Bluetooth device is used for scanning. NFC rarely used;
• Big UI, high-contrast elements are the usual things for interfaces. Which make sense because of the context of using, — dark and rush environment make work very stressful;
• Most of the solutions give the feedback of validation for the picking process, by using bright red or green colors for errors, success states;
• Manual scanning of each item protects the picking up the process from the human mistakes;
• Some solutions support to work with several orders together;
• Very few solutions display item details with a proper photo, description, and fulfillment;
• Typically the flows for the picking up process are straightforward and clear;
• Most of the solutions show the location of items and use physical navigation in the warehouse;
• Most of the solutions have a poor visual hierarchy in-app.

Competitors screenshots

Flow

To release you from looking at the competitors’ screenshot, just check the typical flow for the pickers app. It’s pretty straightforward, as work requires minimum mistakes.

Typical apps flow

Empathy for pickers

Before we jump to shaping the design solution, let’s, firstly, check the context and user need based on benchmarking that we’ve done.

Who — workers who are working on the warehouse, sometimes, know nothing about a warehouse inventory. Workers have many orders and try to do their job efficiently. They rarely have the empathy to their customers, because they’ve never interacted with them.

When — let’s say each worker has a shift, it’s some hours, over which a picker concentrated on doing their job like updating inventory, picking the products, and many others. And apart from that their work requires interacting with other pickers.

Where — typically during shift pickers spend time in storages with racks, with lack of light, rounded products, boxes, and packages, usually their hands are busy with device or a paper pick list and picked products.

I split the whole process into the logical stages, that every order is passing over on the way to your home.

Steps during the picking process

Journey Mapping

The process associates with many users, so I moved to Journey Mapping to get to know what dependencies between the system, app, and users. The map covers all participants but concentrates only on picker’s needs, obstacles and duties.

Service Mapping

Following the link for the entire version of Map. Yeah, the map is complex and big.

Picker app

Problems

To sum up, the problems we have on each step:

1. An order placed;

• Mismatch with inventory naming;
• No relevant info about courier arriving;
• No complete specifications about order;

2. Reviewing an order;

• No ability to edit order;
• The database is not appropriate and items aren’t available;
• Difficult to change an item in the ongoing order based on clients demand;
• Difficult to check availability in the database;
• Another picker can already pick up the order;

3. Picking up;

• No navigation in the warehouse;
• Mess in the warehouse;
• No visibility of the picking up process;
• Difficult to designate the current order status;
• Difficult to regulate the right amount of items;
• Hard to control picking up the right item;
• No visual association between the item in an order and in storage;

4. Ready to delivery;

• Wrong order status;
• Missing item in order;
• Order isn’t ready when a courier arrived;

I will not consider the rest of the stages, because it’s rarely connected with the picking process, but I believe, it’s enough for shaping the design solution direction.

Design solutions

So, taking into account the problems, let’s figure out the possible scenarios and features for the app.

• Using a phone camera or NFC for scanning items during picking, immediately update the inventory in the database;
• Using physical navigation in the warehouse;
• Using prioritization for orders — complete in-progress orders firstly;
• Showing % progress of order fulfillment and display the order status;
• Allow pickers manage orders — remove, add, replace items with mentioned reasons;
• Allow pickers to communicate with clients for discussing availability items;
• Automatically send a notification to client and courier in case of changing the status;
• Showing courier’s ETA;
• Using personal barcode for fast login to the device;
• Picklist for picking several orders;

Navigation architecture

The next step was creating a flow for application and finding all dependencies with possible use cases.

App flow

While I was reviewing the picking process I realized some missed features which can help make the picker’s job more smooth.

• Finished orders can be in the separate menu because it’s rarely used;
• Add a full store inventory copy, in case, if the customer asks to replace something or check availability;
• Global search and filtering. It would help when the client doesn’t know the correct item name or SKU. Also, add the ability to scan QR code for checking an item availability;

Here you can find the full flow with comments and notes:

Picker app

The concept

Of course, when you start creating wireframes for a new product, one of the things pops up is device orientation. For sure, many things have an impact on choices, for instance, some pickers carry a device on hand. Landscape layout is better for organizing info, but the app is used during walking and portrait layout is better for this. I even walked with a tablet to check which orientation is better. With the portrait layout, the device holds more stable. Also, it shouldn’t be a big tablet, for more comfortable using it must be around 7 inches. So reasonably it would be an android device.

The second point was a guideline, should it follow android guidelines? Then I thought over the condition of using the tablet. The condition is different from typical users. Pickers use the app in the warehouse where lots of items, could be not enough light. Normally, they use a device with one hand, in the meantime, they pick items with another hand… So the advised sizes of element wouldn’t work for us, but let’s follow just the android patterns of navigation, as devices could be low-performance.

Then I started designing information levels for the app. On the top of the screen (more difficult-to-reach area) will include generic info that doesn’t need any actions. The next is info related to content — orders status and etc. The next is content — orders + elements that require interaction. And on the bottom of the screen, in the most easy-to-reach area, is area for primary CTAs.

Layout organization

Design

For the concept, I chose a dark turquoise color as a primary what creates a good contrast, big UI elements that stand out and increased font for better visibility. The yellow color I used as the accent color and only for status and other small UI elements. You can check the interactive prototype here:

Click here to view the project `Picker App`

Throughout the visual phase, I continuously tested the prototype on the device and examined interaction, so the final design had changed because of usability concerns. However there are many open topics, so, this design approach should be customized for particular business needs and picking environments. Some principal solutions also outlined below in the images.

Screen solutions

Summary

Through the desk study, I have touched the surface of the entire warehouse ecosystem, it was certainly exciting for me to explore the new field. Of course, for a more holistic and contextual approach, you still need to do a deep user analysis to recognize precise user needs and business logic.

Thanks for reading, if you have any feedback or questions, drop a comment or write me to nadiia.shymchenko@gmail.com or Twitter

I hope you enjoy the study as well!