Courtney Sizemore | Product Experience Designer

01 Overview

The Product

A smart, web-based inventory management solution for pharmacies in the retail, long term care, and acute space.

My Role & The Team

As the dedicated product designer on this team I was responsible for everything from discovering the problem to designing the solution.


Stakeholders Involved

- Manger of the Account Manager & Team

- Development Delivery Manager & Team

- Product Manager

02 Discovering the Problems

Research was performed with pharmacies that have two or more physical locations under common ownership. Conversations were targeted at understanding their current and desired workflow for moving inventory between different pharmacies.


We wanted to understand the current workflow for identifying drugs with low usage or drugs that could not be returned for credit, how they pull, track, and pack those items for shipment, and the approval process for the receiving store to accept or deny what was being sent.


Using the current interface, we discussed hurdles they face when trying to interpret the data they have been given.

Customer Research Output

03 Defining the Problem

After the customer interviews, we identified multiple points of friction.

   

-A misunderstanding of the overall definition of overstock and the relationship between dead stock and excess stock

     

-An inability to quickly identify sister stores

that regularly use an item

     

- A manual process for receiving approval to send inventory to a sister store

   

- A lack of visibility into when a request for a

transfer has been received

   

- A lack of control over the report output

Overview of Current Customer Process

04 Defining the Main Problem

How might we enable pharmacies with common ownership to move inventory between locations so that they can avoid throwing away prescription drugs.

05 Designing the Solution

The success of the design for this workflow would be entirely dependent on giving equal priority to what is deadstock at pharmacy and which sister store would dispense the item, otherwise the pharmacy would just paying to move stock that will expire anyways.


We also needed to consider what every pharmacy differs on the type of items they are willing to transfer and the report would need to ensure that flexibility.


06 Delivering the Solution

I created a high-fidelity prototype using Axure RP that would allow usability research participants to interact with proposed features such as…


- Specifying transferring store parameters

- Specifying receiving store parameters

- Creating a transfer based on recommendations



07 Testing the Prototype with Users

Research Goals

  1. Better understand the interplay between push and pull requests

  2. Better understand how pharmacies would use the visibility into another store's stock

Sample Questions Needing Answers

  • Are the receiving store parameters effective?

  • Do users want recommendations on the store to send to?

  • Do users want to ignore min/max values on recommendations?

  • What would be the most desirable default 'sort by'?

  • Is there general interest in access to other stores inventory?


08 Final Deliverables

Research isn't useful until it is acted upon. I worked to inform the team at large both about what we found and about how we were going to prioritize the features/workflow updates the customers found most impactful. Deliverables and artifacts from this project included…


  • - Two Research Plans
  • - Recorded Interviews
  • - Two Research Synthesis Mural Board
  • - Research Synthesis Powerpoint Deck
  • - Highlight reel from the interviews
  • - High Fidelity Prototype
  • - JIRA cards


A beta version of this solution is still in development. Contact me to discuss the full functionality of the most up-to-date prototype.