LP Flow - Inventory management software

Software for managing the repair and sales flows of transportation pallets.

Goal

Lavapörssi is company specialized in repair and resale of transportation pallets.

The company had noted that the efficiency of their internal workflow was plateuing. Although inventory numbers were kept in a spreadsheet, updating it during a working day wasn't possible due to the moving, physical working conditions. As a result, the company was using a pen and paper method for daily inventory.

In order to improve the workflow, Lavapörssi turned to software. Their goal was to create an application that would enable real-time updating of inventory and make it easier to check for errors.

To comply with non-disclosure agreements, I have omitted or altered any confidential information about the project.

CLIENT

Lavapörssi

YEAR

2016

DEVELOPMENT TEAM

a designer and an external developer

MY ROLE

service design, user research, UX/UI design, developer handoff, outsourcing, project management

TOOLS

Figma

USERS

internal employees and supervisors

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The work

The work included:

Spending considerable time at Lavapörssi work environment to understand their workflow and identify pain points
Creating workflow maps to confirm use cases with employees
Designing application user flows for real-time inventory management. The designs allowed workers to input and edit their inventory numbers on fly using a tablet, and supervisors to cross-check the numbers and individual worker inputs.
Testing the user flows with Lavapörssi employees using mockups
Creating specifications and handoffs for development
Outsourcing developers and managing the implementation of the software

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Takeaways

Some of my learnings from the project were:

Spending time with users at their actual place of work makes it much easier to uncover their pain points.
Understanding and outlining desired user flows is especially important in a software that relies on constant data input and accuracy.
Testing software is a lot of work, and is best done in a joint effort between owners, designers and developers. While the user experience for an internal software doesn't need to be flashy, error minimization is still crucial.