Guided Stockroom Audits
Modernized 3,300 retail stores by co-creating a simple, faster process for associates to audit their stockrooms
Designed to balance task completion speed and accuracy, I partnered with product and store operations to craft a system that worked across 4 unique brands and locales, with different standards and expectations.
Role
Senior User Experience Designer
Timeline
3 months
Team
Product, Tech, UI Designer, Scrum
Responsibilities
Discovery research, In-store Usability Testing
Rapid prototyping, Mentored another designer,
Collaborated with operations on SOP’s and Help Documentation
Project overview + Impact
Gap Inc. field associates historically conducted stockroom audits invisibly to the business by paper, pencil, and verbal communication. Inaccurate stockroom inventory data meant finding items for customers or fulfilling online orders took longer or had to be re-routed, ultimately reducing company revenue.
Our goal was to make inventory auditing simple for the associate, and transparent for the business.
Guided stockroom auditing experience
Once an associate selects a stockroom and authenticates, the app guides the associate through the racks methodically.
Instock provides governance and transparency across inventory teams, streamlining a legacy directive that was often chaotic, random, and disorganized.
Auditing a SKU
Associates select and scan a SKU from the rack, counts the sizes, and updates the system.
Visual indicators, and a flexible editing IXD, help associates complete this task without slowing their workflow through over-engineering audits.
Complete SKU Animation
After auditing a SKU, the app provides success indicators, and animations, to help associates continue auditing the rest of the rack.
Discovery research
Went in-store to meet with supervisors & associates across our 4 brands to observe audits, ask questions. I noticed they tend to perform them with one hand, while sifting through merchandise in the other. This guided our design to prioritize options that facilitated auditing procedures that allowed for visibility across all sizes in a SKU, without sacrificing usability during 1-thumb navigation.
Process map
Architecture
Affinity map
Mind map
In-store usability test
Tested 2 different concepts in-store with associates, measuring task completion, speed, accuracy, and ease of use. I crafted the test plan, built interactive prototypes, conducted the research alongside Product, and synthesized the results.
Concept A felt like the right choice at inception, but B performed the best. By giving associates the ability to edit multiple sizes quickly, it provided enough governance and flexibility to gain sign-off across our 4 brand stakeholders.
Challenges I overcame
Managing Multiple Perspectives
I balanced many perspectives to bring this small pilot to a global rollout. Product, eng, 4 different brand stakeholders, with differing customer and associate behaviors in-store. Strategies used included communicating early, and often. Role play. And bringing insights from the store to the HQ.
Technology constraints
I had to leverage approved devices like the iPod integrated with a Zebra device, which handled scanning and communicating with our inventory systems. Gap’s inventory audit procedures changed across each brand, and they were not interested in investing in novel opportunities like RFID, or anything beyond manual inventory tracking by associates.
Shifting Priorities
Gap Inc.’s business was struggling, and the company changed course on divesting from Old Navy. This required lots of internal negotiations to ensure our pilot and rollout didn’t get lost in the commotion, re-negotiating timelines, and being a flexible design partner.
What’s next for guided audits
Evolving % Accuracy Over Time
With a brand new metric corporate can track, this allows us to continue partnering with operations to fine-tune procedures, and help close the gap between our inventory systems, and in-store realities. Until the business wants to invest in novel inventory technologies like NFT or Amazon Pickup & Go, continuous improvements on manual inventory management will help ensure the rest of the Stores product ecosystem can count on accuracy when making decisions around which stores to source inventory to fulfill customer oders both online, and in-store.