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Pikrun
Warehouse picking is one of the major aspects of order fulfilment and is considered to be one of the most labour intense activities in a warehouse. The manual picking process at Keepspace was tedious and required a lot of time and labour. Pikrun was designed to make the picking process at the warehouse faster and easier for scaling.
PROBLEM
Design a mobile app for picking orders at the e-commerce fulfilment warehouse.
ROLES
User Research, Product Design, User Interface Design, UX, Testing
SOLUTION
A user-friendly mobile app that can be used for picking orders at the fulfilment warehouse with the following metrics:
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Reduced picking time by 4
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Reduced labour
DESIGN METHODS
Wireframing, Prototyping, User research, Contextual Inquiry, Personas, Affinity maps, Task flows, User flows
TOOLS
Adobe XD, Invision
Foundational Research
DEFINING RESEARCH GOALS
Since I was new to the e-commerce fulfilment process, I started off with generative research to understand the process and pain points. I conducted contextual inquiry with the warehouse pickers and semi-structured interviews with the warehouse admins. The following were the goals for the research.
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To understand user perceptions and behaviors while picking orders in a warehouse.
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To analyze current order picking trends.
RESEARCH METHODS
I researched the internet to see if there is something out there. There are a lot of applications that facilitate warehouse picking but almost all of them were web based and mostly focused on warehouse management. I also spoke to the users to understand their processes and pain points.
CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY
with 4 warehouse pickers to understand the picking process and pain points
INTERVIEW
with 2 warehouse admins to understand how they handle orders and assign them for picking
DESK RESEARCH
Research about the company's incoming order trends and picking statistics
Understanding the users
Talking to two types of major users namely the warehouse picker and the warehouse admin gave me insights into the pain points and frustrations they face. To empathize with the users, I created empathy maps from the interview data.
Research Insights
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Manual picking of orders is time taking and frustrating.
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People like to cover products in nearby locations together during a picking run.
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Warehouse operators like to know the real time picking status to manage batching and inventory.
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Pickers want to keep track of what they already picked and what they are yet to pick.
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Pickers want to cover more number of orders in lesser number of runs.
Identifying User Needs and Business Goals
I spoke with the company stakeholders to understand 'why' they were trying to improve this particular process and the reason behind this mission. This helped me know the key metrics I need to focus on while building the product.
Reduce picking time
Reduce labour
Prepare for expansion
Brainstorming Workshop
Conducted brainstorming sessions with cross teams to avoid ideation biases and come up with ideas. I started of the session with the following "How might we?" questions.
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How might we reduce picking time?
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How might we reduce labour?
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How might we be prepared for expansion?
The participants were given three minutes of time for each question and asked to write their ideas on sticky notes. The next ten minutes were spent on categorizing the ideas. Themes were developed from the categories and the top themes were voted upon.
Concept scenarios
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Emma has been assigned a new batch of orders.
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She picks up the right trolley.
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She finds the location for the first item.
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She picks the item and places it in the trolley.
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She continues to pick all items in the batch.
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She leaves the trolley at the assigned packing station and completes the batch.
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Emma is in the middle of an order.
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She wants to know if she picked a particular product or not.
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She accesses batch info from the app.
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She finds the product she wanted to know about.
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Emma successfully proceeds with the order.
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Emma has to restart a batch that she left midway the previous day.
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She find out details about the batch from the app.
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She picks up the right trolley.
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She restarts picking for the batch.
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Emma successfully completes picking the batch.
Early Concept Testing
I conducted a sample test with two pickers in the warehouse to evaluate the concept of batching orders and providing users with a list of items to be picked. I gave the warehouse pickers a batch of dummy orders to pick. The batch and the information regarding items were prototyped in a paper. The idea of batching worked well and significantly cut down on the amount of order picking time. Additionally, concept testing enabled me to identify a few error scenarios earlier.
Wrong item picked
It was noticed that the item that was picked by the warehouse picker wasn't the original item that was supposed to be picked.
Items not in stock at the location.
A few items were not in stock at the primary location that was specified and the user was confused about what was the next step to take or where else to find the item.
Final concept
BATCH ORDERS
Orders can be added to a batch and assigned to a picker for picking
SCAN SKU
The barcode is scanned for every item that is picked to ensure there are no picking errors
AVAILABLE LOCATIONS
If an item is not in stock in the specified location, the picker can see the secondary storage location for the item
After knowing which solutions we will be proceeding with, I created a task flow of how the user would use the app to complete key tasks and followed it with some low-fi wireframe sketches.
Prototype testing
I used the low fidelity wireframes to present to the user and stakeholders. I conducted a full-fledged test for an entire batch with 4 users at the warehouse. Each test took about 20 minutes to complete. This helped in identifying minor errors and usability issues.
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Reviews, feedback and iterations
After creating high fidelity prototypes, I followed a feedback loop, leading weekly design reviews. I used this time to present designs to the users and stakeholders, and receive feedback. This helped in keeping the designs under check and consistently improving the designs.
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Results
I conducted a full-fledged test to see how far we have solved the problem. In an ideal case we wanted to reduce the order picking time by 6 times. The latest version of the app reduces the order picking time by 4 times.
Reflection
This was one of the most favorite projects that I worked on. I got to collaborate cross-functionally with the engineering team and marketing team. I explored a new approach of conducting a brainstorming session with people from different teams and it turned out to be successful. I feel this helped in bringing out different perspectives. I have observed in first hand, how continuous testing can drastically improve a product over a course of time. The app still has the potential for a lot of new things. How can we make the app acessible to everyone? What if we could improvise picking routes and find the shortest picking route? What if we can notify users when they have arrived at the warehouse location? How would the picking process work if we pick products concurrently as and when new orders come in? These are just a few questions that I might explore if I continued work on this project.
