Summary

I led a user-centered effort to create a new mobile app that helps retail employees manage in-store inventory more efficiently and accurately. The app was a success. RADAR, a YC-backed startup I joined as its fourth employee, raised $50M and a major retailer agreed to launch our product in 500 stores.

Contribution

• Conceptual design

• Generative UX research

• Process mapping

• Product design

• Product development

• Product management

• Prototyping

• User tasks and flows

• Usability testing

• UI design (low fidelity)

• Wireframes

Situation

Retail stores lose millions each year due to inventory inaccuracies and low employee productivity. The tools retail employees use to locate products and manage inventory in stores are often clunky and outdated.

RADAR invented a new method of using RFID and computer vision to track the location of physical objects in real-time and in three dimensions. Our offering consisted of both hardware and software, and our first application was for the retail industry.

Our platform gave retail stores increased visibility into which products were in their stores and where each product was located. In addition to inventory benefits such as reducing out-of-stock products and finding items more quickly for customers, our system had the potential to improve high-impact operational processes such as restocking the sales floor.

Task

We needed a simple yet powerful way for retail employees to interact with this new level of inventory data and make the best use of it in their stores. Our solution had to augment and supercharge critical in-store workflows to provide immediate value.

Solution

Working closely with real users, I planned and executed an end-to-end product design process that led to a full-featured yet easy-to-use mobile app.

The core of the app is a store map that allows retail employees to see the physical location of every product in real time. Operational features streamlined common tasks, such as checking stock levels for an item or restocking items that were sold off the sales floor.

By talking with retailers at each step in the process, my team and I made informed trade-offs and crafted the experience to suit the unique needs of our users. Many themes emerged, but two stood out:

Flexibility

Every store is a little different. Retail employees wanted a tool that could adapt to their unique store processes instead of forcing them into one-size-fits-all solutions.

This theme helped me decide how the restock feature worked, and specifically, the way the list of items, or “pick list,” should function. The feature needed to prevent multiple people from picking the same items at the same time, while also supporting the informal nature of employee collaboration and division of labor.

During a series of customer feedback sessions, I tested different business rules for pick lists. The model that worked best made each pick list mutually exclusive but filterable by department. Upfront filtering prevented picker collisions while still making it possible for users to easily divide up the picking duties.

In addition, to avoid items in one person’s list from being needlessly reserved only for them, I made each pick list accessible by all employees. One person can take over another’s list, or multiple people can work together on a single person’s list if they prefer.

Efficiency

It was clear that any feature that saved even a small amount of time had an outsized impact for users since much of what they do is repetitive.

With this in mind, I designed the pick lists to be dynamically updated. As soon as our system detected an item on the list had physically moved to the sales floor, it disappeared from the list.

This meant users never picked more items than needed due to an old view of what was on the sales floor. It also meant users didn’t have to mark items as picked while picking, unless they wanted to, in which case they could simply swipe on the item in the list.

Result

Use of the app led to a boost in productivity and inventory accuracy for our first pilot customer. RADAR raised over $50M and inked a deal with American Eagle Outfitters to launch in 500 stores.