Problem

Within the Huboo warehouses their picking & packing operatives use an in-house application (perfect picking) to fulfil customer orders. The app shows what orders need to be completed, the items included within that order and its delivery options.  

Some of the problems that had been found were around highlighting orders in progress by other users. Because with the current system once an order task had been viewed the app would mark it as ‘in progress’ even if the task had not been completed. Meaning that you could end up with a task list full of in progress order tasks leaving users not knowing who or if anyone was working on them. Another reason that tasks could be interacted with and not completed could be down to there being a problem with the order ie. missing stock or packaging. The system had no way to flag that these tasks were ‘problem orders’ leaving warehouse ops no visibility of orders that couldn’t be fulfilled.  

Goal

The goal was to make it easier to view if tasks were in progress and to highlight what member of staff was working on them. Also to have a way to show and mark any orders that may have an issue that would stop someone from fulfilling an order. To improve filtering to make it easier to plan out high priority tasks ie. picks for next day delivery.

Needs

Warehouse ops were in need of a way to sort orders that could help with day to day organisation. The current workflow would see them having start of day meetings to work out who would work on what task. This was done to try and make sure no one would end up working the same task. There also needed to be a way to not have a task marked as in progress if it wasn’t actively being worked on by someone. Thoughts for this were to have the user faced with a modal asking why they might be leaving a task without completing. After conversations with users some of the possible reasons they might leave a task could be missing stock/packaging, check to see the amount of items within a pick or opened by mistake. Supervisors wanted a centralised place within the system so they could get an overview of any problem orders that they could try and resolve.

COMPANY
Huboo Technologies Ltd

ROLE
UI designer
Product thinking, visual design, prototyping

TEAM
1 Designer, 1 Product manager,
1 Lead developer