Here is a short excerpt from my bachelor thesis, which deals with research and analysis of the most common e-commerce warehouse processes and their optimization through designing and implementing solutions in a warehouse system called Swordfish. As this was a collaboration with a software company, most of it is protected by NDA so I will focus on the process.
User interviews, field research, problem definition, ideation workshop, wireframing, storyboard, prototyping, remote testing, development
Dec 2019 - Jun 2020
The challenge was to improve Swordfish, the warehouse system, so that it streamlines the work in the warehouse more than the previous version.
Previously offline process of the e-commerce orders packing is now digitalized, which helps prevent errors, lowers mental load on workers and makes work faster.
Through user interviews and field research, I’d found out that out of all the most common processes happening in a warehouse, Swordfish helped only with the picking. In many other processes, all the responsibility was left on the workers- they had to memorize many data and do unnecessary actions, which lead to various mistakes and a slow work pace, leaving them frustrated.
I've identified 7 serious problems amongst the most common processes. To know which ones to solve, I've facilitated a small workshop with the relevant stakeholders, and we decided to focus on solving three of them and analyzed their subproblems. Later on, I've found it very challenging to solve three huge problems at once, so in the future I'll prefer to do it one bite at a time.
The ideation phase was very difficult as with every idea, there were many details I had to take into consideration and new problems rising I had to solve. Few wireframe versions later, I’ve prepared prototypes based on the storyboard, representing my solutions.
During testing, which had to be remote due to Covid-19, I’ve received a feedback on my designs. Testers liked the solutions to the 1st and the 2nd problem but they struggled a bit to operate them and as it came out these solutions did not cover all the edge cases and technical details. For the time restraints on my thesis, I did not continue working on them.
However, testers loved the solution to the 3rd problem and couldn’t believe how much it would simplify their work. While testing this part, I have observed only minor issues which I fixed and so the 'packing' task was ready for development. You can see one of the changes made to the top bar in the following image.
I’ve implemented the front-end of the ‘Packing’ task using Vue.js & Vuetify and designed the API structure for communication with the back-end.
Swordfish helped with picking.
Swordfish helps with picking and packing.
This was my first big commercial design project. I learned a lot about the design thinking and individual activities like field research, remote testing and prototyping. The biggest learning however is, that we should solve problems one at a time. I have done a mistake of trying to solve 3 big problems at once, which prolonged iterations, slowed down the process and with a little less luck I would have no real solution ready for my thesis.
Looking back at this project 3 years later, I would evaluate more the effect of automatization on the workers. It might affect their happiness, sense of achievement or control leaving them unsure about their performance.
