MN General Merchandise (App Design)

APP DESIGN

MN General Merchandise Inventory Management

Designing an inventory management system to maximize the business profitability and minimize total inventory investment.

UI/UX Design

InVision

May 2021

OVERVIEW

MN General Merchandise is a small business in Sagay City with a vision to integrate technology on their growing environment to master its services and separate them from other competitors.

The objective of this particular project was to maximize the business profitability and minimize total inventory investment. Distributors should be able to measure the profitability of their operation by analyzing the sales volume, gross profit, and operating expenses while also providing a level of visibility into their product and material-related transactions.

BACKGROUND

A successful inventory management system exceeds customers’ expectations on product availability, to maximize the business's profitability and minimize total inventory investment. It is important that the distributors are able to measure the profitability of their operation by analyzing the sales volume, gross profit, and operating expenses. It should provide a level of visibility into the business's product and material-related transactions.

My team and I wanted to tackle the issue of how to assist small businesses in our community to monitor the process of products coming in and out of their retail stores, especially large businesses such as general merchandise. I was the sole designer on the team in charge of the app design for tablet device compatibility, alongside 2 researchers and another designer in charge of the app design for smartphone device compatibility.

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM

To uncover the pains felt by our client, the manager and owner of the general merchandise, an interview was arranged, and it was revealed that:

employees have limited information on some areas of the business stocks.
there were cases where a customer asks an employee regarding a specific product and the employee does not know what/where the specific product is.
employees at times do not have any idea or are not certain about the products’ prices, what it looks like, and the number of stocks available for a certain product.

VISION AND SOLUTION

From these findings, we decided to list and identify the key business goals, being:

to develop a system that would provide details of the product/s availability, quantity, price, and illustration.
to develop a system that would be able to record the transaction details being done.
to develop a system that enables the business to monitor the availability of the products and update the inventory in terms of restocking products.

As a starting point, the team discussed the major components/features that should be included in the system, this includes the sales report, restocking functionality, product listing/information, and a log-in screen for security to accommodate the manager and employees. The client suggested developing a mobile application that can be utilized by a flagship tablet and mobile application.

METHODOLOGY

The team used prototyping and Agile development as the system’s methodology. Prototyping by designing a user interface for mobile applications to visualize the functionality of the application. Below shows the outline of the system methodology.

DESIGN

Given two months to finish the design, I quickly did some mockups of the basic user journey. I opted for a dark theme and deep blue as the system color to represent the business brand and to accomplish simplicity in the UI. For better user experience, I ensure that the user will be accustomed to the interface by utilizing air space for users to be able to breathe in as they move around the screens. I realized that having a cluttered interface would be straining to the eyes of the user and can lead to confusion and less conversion rate, which is the percentage of users who take a desired action while using the system.

TAKEAWAYS

Overall, I believe this project showcased my skill in UI/UX over the past couple of weeks. Being able to manage, create, and organize a timeline of tasks was something that I shouldered during the process. As the sole designer of this project, the challenge of working independently motivated me to push myself to the limit to create an app design that can be very useful and pleasingly agile.

In the future, when creating more prototypes, something to consider is designing more interfaces and dive deep in the motion of UI elements in order to improve the user experience. I believe that motion and animation influence users' decisions and show the relationship between elements and functionalities.

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