Makrand Patwardhan
Inventory Management is backbone for any retail operations. For this project, we primarily focused on “Product (SKU)” management sub-module. It involves creation and maintenance of products, pricing, SEO, etc. It was one of the earliest sub-module in Warehouse, which is Grassdoor’s logistics portal, hence, over time, it had become bit tedious to use with addition of multiple features over time.
Primary challenges faced by the Inventory team provided were -
To conduct the end-to-end SKU management inside Warehouse portal and reduce dependency on Excel worksheets.
I was the lead UX designer on this project. I was responsible for planning, requirement gathering and designing the new interface. Our team consisted of 1 BA and some developers (based on requirement post-design completion).
Here is the story of how we got here…
The primary user for this module was “Inventory Manager”. But, other users like Buyers (who provided new SKU details) and Marketer (who entered additional product and SEO details) were involved in the whole process. Hence, we conducted walkthrough sessions with each of the roles. We also discussed the initial requirement document with additional stakeholders for deciding the success factor for design and development effort.
Additional issue areas identified during these sessions -
My first task was to conduct an in-depth analysis of all the data fields in the multiple forms currently used in the system. The goal was to remove any unused or unrelated data points.
Post analysis, we made following changes -
This allowed us to align on SKU governance system and what additional validations related to the same be incorporated.
Page Header: contains the system-generated data fields like Product Name, SKU Name, Date fields, Status alongwith appropriate User actions
General Information: Key information, pricing and menu management data fields
Product Information: All data fields required for sales and marketing of the product (This section is to be managed by Marketing team)
SEO Information: All data fields related to SEO activities are available here to be managed by SEO team
Domain Information:
Status management: In this iteration, status change was to be handled manually via prompt.