Pro Inventory

Warehouse field service app

Project Overview

This field service app is part of a bigger integrated enteprise system for Proto Energy. Proto Energy is an Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) distributor that uses reusable metal gas cylinders to sell LPG to households.

The Pro Inventory application was created to enable Proto Energy warehouse staff manage the inventory under their care in multiple service centers and depots. The app was designed to assist the staff quickly, efficiently and without error:

Load and offload trucks and small quantity vehicles with inventory through a digital handshake.
Conduct Stock Counts of the inventory in their care.
Sell to walk in customers.
Receive replenishments of inventory and issue back empty cylinders in their custody.

My Contribution

UX Research

UI Design

User Testing

Tools Used

Figma

Useberry

Users

Lilian Kimani

Container Coordinator

Lilian’s Job is to ensure that distribution vehicles are loaded an offloaded correctly, and that the stock in he custody is properly accounted for. She is the main user we were designing for.

Moureen Masese

Shop Attendant

Moureen’s job is to provide support with individual riders who deliver cylinders to customer’s homes. The number of transactions she does are many more than Lilian since the order sizes the riders fulfil are smaller. This means that she will need the app to make it easy for her to keep track of her transactions so that she does not lose inventory.

Wireframes

As part of a design sprint, we created wireframes to help us validate our ideas with business and the uses and got a number of insights from this stage:
Insights

The users liked the fact that actions they regularly perform were available on the home page and the steps to complete the action were relatively easy and straight forward.
We had introduced the idea of users scanning QR codes as a way to validate a handshake between the warehouse staff and the drivers. While the idea was good, it had a number of technical difficulties in its implementation that would make the feature unreliable. It was shelved for the future and did not go into high fidelity prototypes.

Insights from testing prototypes

Our initial prototypes were created with a goal to test the usability of the app before the app went into development. We gained a number of insights when we tested the initial screens with users.

The SKU Selection flow was not ideal and required the user to go through too many steps before completing the process.
The flow was self explanatory and users were able to navigate to the areas they needed for them to complete their tasks without any guidance or training.
Users complemented the app on its ease of use.

We used Useberry (a remote unmoderated testing tool).

As you can see in the heat-maps generated from the user testing exercise, the users were able to recognise the elements on the UI and perform the actions expected without any prior training.
There were a few places where they got tripped up and these formed the basis of the next iteration.

The Shipped Solution

The solution I handed off to the engineers incorporated the lessons learned from feedback sessions with stakeholders and testing data from the users. Below is a sample of the final screens.

The Home Screen

The home screen had shortcuts to all the major functionality that the users would need in order to complete their tasks. It was designed to be a quick and easy way for the the users to perform their tasks then move to the next one without having to access the navigation.

Home Delivery Management

As a shop attendant, you would need to manage the small assets you have loaded to deliver to retail clients. You would also need to provide support to the drivers to help them deliver to the client as quickly as possible.

The flow allows the user to manage all of the inventory they have issued to small order drivers and support the drivers in delivering the order swiftly.

Selling Flow

One of the things that can be done at a distribution point is selling directly to walk in customers. This flow allows the users to sell the stock keeping units to these walk in customers in a simple and fast way.