The Warehouse Operator
My Role
Lead design of the project from discovery, ideation, user research, requirement engineering, prototyping, and developing final screens.
The warehouse operator provides the power of SAP's Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) solution to the user on a mobile platform, all the while leveraging the phones most powerful features like its camera, processing power, accessibility and intuitive usability.
Introduction
SAP’s main product is EWM. Which has been, in its current state, in use for a very long time. Around 80%-90% of the top 500 companies use it and it is capable of doing nearly everything that is required in a regular warehouse process.
It has thousands of unique data points and each customer can customize the system to their unique working style which is individually adapted to their specific warehouse.
The Project
My task was to create a native mobile application that leverages EWM on a mobile device to ultimately gain customer adoption and move our users away from the big old "laser-guns".
But, the reality is that EWM has never needed to changed because it didn't need to, it does everything customers want and more, so what where we going to offer the user that they would make the switch from a decade old system and "laser-guns" to our app?
Pain Points
The biggest pain points my users have with the existing browser based EWM solution:
1. Usability: EWM is very old and as such doesn't adhere to some of the more common usability law
2. Accessibility: basically non-existent
3. Device: The scan devices are large and not intuitive to use
4. Speed: The current system and devices makes entering data and scanning very slow
To solve our users pain points we focused on offering them three main benefits:
1. Ease of use: the first thing was to make the previous UI understandable to the user with very clear actions
2. Camera: Utilise the phones powerful camera to scan for barcodes, QR codes and also text
3. Context: Only show the most important information that the user needs to complete his task
The Solution
To gain any understanding of what problems the customers and the user are facing today with their current technology I had to dive head first into their world.
For this we conducted several workshop with SAP's existing customers.
The outcome was a end-to-end user journey and a updated persona on which I could guide my next steps to come.
To understand how the app should behave and work, I created the information architecture and interaction diagrams to quickly come to a screen flow which could be put into a working prototype.
Iteration
To build a product which solves real problems and is intuitively useful to the user I worked very iteratively through multiple research cycles and kept adapting.
The user research I used for this project was qualitative research ranging from guided and non-guided prototype testing, click-flows, A-B testing and regular 1on1 interviews.
Starting at the very first workshop we built V1 together with the customer in a 3 day design sprint.
After our first user research with the end user I had to iterate on the initial design as it showed that the user needed more guidance so I created V2 with very clear CTA's and as little distraction as possible.
This concept was taken even further in V3 with an even clearer UI to further enhance the visual hierarchy.
Below you can see an example of the scanning screens which are our main USP of the application.
With every design iteration I stripped away any unnecessary distraction so that the user can just focus on the task at hand, all the while having quick access to any function that they would need.
The Biggest Challenge
The biggest challenge of the project was to understand what SAP's EWM (Extended Warehouse Management) capabilities are, what it is currently used for by our customers, and which data we can leverage from EWM through existing API's to bring value to our customers and end-users with new technologies that would make their lives better.
Prototype
Play around with it and have fun :)
