Reimagining how products get from the shelves into customers hands. 

What Is the Picklist?

When items are ordered online, reach the end of their life, or otherwise need to be moved, they need to be picked off of the shelves. Thats where the picklist comes in. The picklist is traditionally a hand-written list given to warehouse workers that helps them locate an item, what to do with it when they find it and where to put it.

The Problem

It was taking our workers far far too long to get items out of the warehouse. After looking at the entire warehouse flow we identified that the picklist was a major bottleneck. Our solution was already digital but it was impossible to navigate, composed of a list of thousands of items to pick. Managers would have to manually give workers number sets to work through and the ruggedized android devices our workers were using would regularly crash due to the sheer size of the picklist on any given day. What to do with the item once you found it was equally as frustrating and caused a cascade of slowdowns through the entire shipping process.

Design-Thinking applied to a complex system

It may be obvious to apply design-thinking to a fairly heavy UI-redesign project. But there are many more ecological factors I had to take into mind and apply design-principles around. Things like how the workers moved through the space, what they needed to do between items, how many steps it took to take an item off the shelf, how much insight we needed into performance and items locations were all factors.

Research

I started the project by observing the current process and flow. I also made a point to talk to everyone relevant to the system new system, and even some outliers to find the edges of its reach. I especially focused on the users since they would be touching and interacting with this tool hundreds of times a day for months/years as part of their normal job duties. Research, however, wasn't a single phase of the project and spanned its entire length, even beyond “final” delivery. I was constantly adjusting based on the feedback I was getting and re-working assumptions, decisions and flows to match what I was able to see happening in the field.

Brainstorming

I reimagined this tool many ways in very rough napkin-level wireframes and sketches. Each time I felt like I was at a good place with the designs and underlying concepts. I worked closely with my development and product management teams for feasibility and to verify it was going to meet our business needs. The feedback back that not only helped me define the scope of the project but took me in whole new and interesting directions. I couldn’t be precious about my designs, the most important thing was making something that worked for our workers on the warehouse floor.

Wireframing

Wireframing was key for this project, as it is for almost every project I work on, having rough and interactive wireframes was instrumental in getting the tool in front of my users as soon as possible so we could begin iterating and reacting to feedback. Shameless plug for Invision here as it allowed me to not only get an interactive wireframe going on my phone for our workers to use but it could record the screen and video of their reactions for review with the team later. 

Rollout

As soon as I started designing this app I realized it would need to be rolled out in stages. The complexity of features and the needed training ramps for workers necessitated a measured approach. As much as I would have liked to roll it out all at once and replace the old janky system it would be too disruptive to a workflow that couldnt afford to be stopped. It was also a new enough flow that no amount of interactive wires could replicate a whole days work with the tool and the new conventions it introduced. As we rolled out I made a series of small and large changes based on usage and feedback from actually using the tool.

Success

By time we launched our workers could hardly remember the old tool, the new one was so integrated into their workflow.. Pickers were able to find items on both sides of an aisle, the app was fast and responsive, only showing the next item for them to find with clear instructions and big pictures. We also introduced metrics so we could measure individual workers, see how picking was occurring warehouse-wide which took a lot of the guess work out of hiring and allocation for picking. This isn’t to say that there wasn’t some resistant to the initial change, it has been in place for many years, but by time my team and I were done everybody was happy, from our users on the floor to the managers. Thats success in my book.