Decant Product Design

Creating a Universal Warehouse Product

Overview

Warehouse operators were struggling with a decanting workflow that was slow, confusing, and error-prone. Customer complaints included “this task takes too long,” and “the steps are confusing." These inefficiencies compounded at scale—impacting throughput, training time, and overall operational cost.

I led the end-to-end redesign of this module, transforming a fragmented workflow into a streamlined, intuitive experience that significantly improved speed and usability.

Impact

Resolved customer complaints, “this task takes too long,” and “the steps are confusing” and discovered the following metrics through Usability Testing:

• 52% less clicks for the end user

• 45% less screens per task

• 36% improvement in processing time per task

My Role

Sole Senior UX Designer and Researcher

• Led user interviews, onsite and remote

• Defined user workflow and information architecture

• Designed wireframes and high fidelity UI

• Conducted A/B Testing and Usability testing

Before I designed the universal decant product, Fortna was operating on a project level, designing and developing a different decant module for each client; this is time consuming, inconsistent, and costly. As a member of the product team, I was tasked to design one product that could be implemented at several, unique, customer sites. Some of the customers were Macy's, H&M, and Amazon. I had no warehouse exeperice, so my first objective was to understand more about the warehouse space, and the different ways a client could operate their decant module.

Once I knew more about the warehouse environment, how decant fits into warehouse operations, and our backend limitations, I wanted to know more about the end user. In this case, the end user is an operator in a warehouse who packs orders that are shipped to retail stores, or consumers who buy online orders. I wanted to understand more about the warehouse environment ie. the lighting and how it affects the screen glare, the size of the screens, if the operator is standing or moving around at their workstations, where are the incoming cases vs. the outgoing bins, and how big are their workstations? I did a site visit to Macy's to clarify those questions, as well as the points below.

Design

This is the part of the end-to-end design process where analysis paralysis can take over, and I have to move on. There is a lot more that I could research about the end user, or about the different edge cases for different clients, but those things will have to be addressed in later iterations. At this point, I open Figma, start a desktop frame, fill in the navigation and side menu, and design from top down and left to right, adjusting sizing and colors as I initially fill in the page. I consulted with other designers on the team who had different modules to productize to ensure consistency. I created new components and added them to our design library as I went along. I had several meetings about icons, icons are tricky! At some point, I was tired of looking at decant, and wanted to rest my eyes on another screen, so when I would get stuck on decant, I'd work on the new landing page for WES (warehouse execution system). This was a great exercise in iconography, and a fun way to be creative at work. The rest of my design process went as follows:

Moderated Usability Testing

After staring at decant for months,  I started to wonder if any of this works? Is any of this intuitive? Is any of this helpful? The answer was yes! I could not test the product with actual end users, another site visit was not in the budget, but I could test the new product with Product Managers, and other people in the office. I printed out pictures of red shirts, orange socks, blue shorts etc to mimic the items that an operator would scan and decant into bins. I placed the stack of paper cutouts in a "source case" and placed a "destination bin" on the other side of the person doing the test to recreate the operator workstation as best I could. Then I had the "operator" use my laptop as an operator screen, clicking through the necessary prompts that would show up on screen. Any time they "scanned" a SKU with their phone, I advanced the screen the way it would advance after implementation. Not only was the new product more visually pleasing, it was faster to use, and more intutive because I surfaced the "call to actions." 

Before (project) and After (product) 

...from outdated, to modern!

Results

I designed a product from end-to-end that Fortna could sell to all of it's clients that need a decant module. In addition to a new prodcut, I also made noteworthy improvements that were discovered through testing:

• Resolved customer complaints, “this task takes too long,” and “the steps are confusing” 

• 52% less clicks for the end user

• 45% less screens per task 

• 36% improvement in processing time per task.