Scheduling application for an FMCG corporate.
Planning and schedule creation application for supply of manufactured products from storage facilities to to the stores.
Client
An FMCG Corporate in USA
Role
Lead Product/UX Designer
Contribution
User Research
Product Strategy
Product Design
Team
Product Team x 5
Product Designer x 1
Visual Designer x 1
Engineers x 25
VISION
This system was envisioned to automate the process of schedule planners’ tasks of bulk-creating distribution schedules for their employees and let their team leaders manage these daily routines.
CONTEXT
The products manufactured by this company need to be supplied to the retail shops daily – across US and Canada. This involves the creation of a large number of complex schedules of their visits to the stores.
Apart from the regular deliveries, the planners needed to plan for sales, offers, holidays, etc into account, when the demand could swell.
The team leads managing the frontline employees need control over how the schedules would be dynamically updated daily. Along with these, the planned and unplanned absences, incidents, and urgent
scenarios also need to be considered.
The system is aimed at catering to different personas having overlapping roles, geographical areas assigned, and shared responsibilities.
TARGET AUDIENCE
Back-office personnel: working on schedule creation &maintenance
Team leads: to manage and update schedules for employees daily.
APPROACH
Through various workshops, discussions, and white-boarding activities with business stakeholders and users, we identified that having to sift through a large set of data was making it difficult to access the right information.
We audited the system, and found some of the interfaces too complex, and cluttered, busy, and confusing. Some data visualization interfaces needed simplification. The user was getting confused and was not able to focus on the right tasks due to heavy sets of data. We resequenced these tasks and presented prioritized action sets.
KEY FEATURES
Personalization: Curated data display & operations for different personas.
Stepped approach: Complex workflows broken down into series of smaller & simpler steps.
Customization: of large grid views suitable for the user’s needs.
Minimalistic design: Ample white space and lighter colors for ease of viewing.
Responsive: Available on the web view of desktop and tabs.
STRATEGY EMPLOYED
Building layers of modules to address increasing complexity.
Curating and presenting only relevant data to the users.
Converting multi-step complex processes & spreadsheets into smaller, simpler connected steps.
Providing more control over data and operations using multiple crucial decision points.
MY ROLE
UX Architect: a product team member on-site at client’s office, interacting with the business stakeholders for Requirements elicitation. Everyday participation in functional process discussions.
User research: Conversing, observing and researching users’ daily habitual ways of working and thinking. Interviewing and learning about their workarounds and identifying their pain points, needs and wants.
Brainstorming: w/ business and users for ideation & innovation.
Process flows: understanding detailed flow of information.
Wireframes: for interaction design.
Managing UI team: for managing Ul design step and design system.
Hand-holding with developers: for helping them understand the information flow, interaction design and UI.
MY CONTRIBUTION
Lead the end-to-end UX design effort in a large team of
total 35+ members comprising of:
SMEs from business, PM, Scrum Master, IT stakeholders,
Technical Architect, Business Analysts, Software Developers/Engineers,
and Testers.
Facilitated workshops, discussions, user research interviews, demos and other discovery sessions.
Presented design artifacts and gathered feedback.
