Stockist: Inventory Management App
A UX Design Project
A friend of mine owns a grocery store. Being one of the biggest in the market, the sale is good and the number of items he has in stock are enough to make a sane man insane if they star to count them. Upon having a conversation with him about all this I discovered he managed all this manually and was also facing losses due to errors in calculations. I them empathized with several other big and small business owners and tried to come up with a solution for all of them. Here’s what I did:
But what is this? This is Stockist, an app to enable the business owners to manage their inventory easily and effectively.
Let me tell you how I did all this. But before that we have to understand the problem in detail.
Project Overview
The Problem: The problem of poor inventory management or the effort required to manually check the inventory was tackled which thus aims to reduce the operation costs of medium and small businesses.
The Goal: The goal was to design an inventory management app that will let users manage the inventory of their businesses by reducing the time, effort and the costs it takes to manage the inventory.
Responsibilities: Conducting User Interviews, paper and digital wireframing, low and high fidelity prototyping, conducting usability studies accounting for accessibility and iterating on designs.
The Design Process
Now that you have a basic understanding of what the actual problem was, let me tell you how I streamlined everything through a very commonly used design process called Design Thinking, and it looks like this:
- Empathizing with the users
The process started with me doing some Primary as well as Secondary research. In simpler terms I tried to understand the problem both by browsing the internet and by asking the users directly about the issues they were facing.
The pain points I gathered through research are:
- Time: Keeping a check of every item is a time taking and tideous process.
- Fees: The providers providing this service charge too much for small businesses.
- Finances: The finances are disturbed because of this and they can’t track it properly.
- Accessibility: Services available not suited for those who can’t read or write, see, etc. or the text is not easy to read.
Given next are the Personas of people I interviewed with their respective problem statements which forms the Define stage of design thinking framework
2. Defining the Problem
Persona 1: Ankur Sharma is a Delhi born man working as a analyst in an investment firm in Hyderabad who needs inventory management options because he is too busy to keep track of everything in the food place he owns.
Persona 2: Neeta Shankar is a Mumbai born woman owning a food place in Hyderabad who needs inventory management options because she has arthritis and as she is getting older it hurts her when she moves too much so she wants easy options for managing inventory of her restaurant.
Now that the personas of potential users have been defined, let me give you a walk through of how the routine of a user would be as they manage their inventory and business everyday. Given below is the whole User Journey.
Now comes the Storyboarding part where we frame a story around the user using our product which aims to solve the problem. This is divided into two parts:
- Big Picture Storyboarding — It gives a broader view of the story.
- Close Up Storyboarding — It gives a closer view of the story.
The research was done, problems were identified, story was built, now what? Now comes the part that converts all this research to reality, i.e. the Design phase.
3. Ideating the solution
We start with creating basic outlines of the application which we call wireframing.
Paper Wireframes
Digital Wireframes
After drawing out these wireframes, it was time to create a prototypes to test the basic functioning of the product.
Low Fidelity Prototypes
4. Usability Testing
I did a usability study on this Low fidelity prototype. I proceeded in 2 rounds and the learnings were as follows:
Round 1 findings
- Takes too much time and effort.
- Inventory management issues.
- Often incur expenses due to poor management options.
Round 2 Findings
- App is useful.
- Need to incorporate language options.
- Need to simplify the search bar.
After considering the inputs in Usability Testing, I moved ahead to create the Mockups and High Fidelity Prototypes of the application.
5. Prototyping
Earlier the app did not have a language option to choose from which was later introduced after the usability study.
Added the login using mobile number option as requested by a user
The floating search option was making it difficult to access the button below it so introduced a side arrow
Hi Fidelity Prototype
Style Guide
Accessibility Considerations
Key Takeaways
- The application will impact the users running small to medium businesses like a person running a food truck who as a part time work and barely has time to manage the inventory. The effort is to reduce effort, time and costs of the users who use conventional manual ways of handling the stocks.
- The problem gave a deep insight about how insignificant a problem seems sometimes but it makes a huge difference in the lives of people affected by it. The project was a challenge in itself requiring to take into account the needs of various groups of users.
Next Steps
- Expanding it for large businesses as well since they are an important user group to target.
- Automating the process since it would be even better if a person does not have to manually keep track of everything.
- Conduct more research to determine more areas of need.
Thankyou for taking out time to read this case study.
Chetanya Batra
