Overview
Advanced Inventory Adjustment is the most recent project in Moka POS, Goto Financial that is intended to support regular merchant stock checking.
Elevating Moka POS to support inventory management is sought to add more value to merchants, therefore, increasing merchant engagement, retention, and overall experience satisfaction using Moka. In order to achieve that, we developed the Advanced inventory Adjustment as the continuation of the basic adjustment feature.
Timeline
Jan 2023- Feb 2023
Team members
Ivana Elisa – Product Designer
Asa Nur H – Researcher
Stephani Felina – UX Copywriter
Jefferson Suhendro – Product Manager
Frandy Jaya and the team – Engineer
My Role
Secondary Research
Concept Ideation
Design solutions & validation
Design Documentation
Problems
According to the research that we internally conducted, we found that the current basic inventory adjustment feature still has room for improvement. Currently, the pain points faced are mostly because of the manual effort in the stock-checking process (e.g paper-based or excel) and reports.
Solution
As a result, we came up with advanced inventory adjustments that focus on helping the manual stock-checking process, by improving the ease of filling in the stock checklist, role restriction due to fraud prevention, and the ease of monitoring the stock movement.
Research
For the initial steps, I collaborated with the product and research team to conduct foundational research that focuses on understanding the merchants’ attitudes and behavior towards performing stock checking and exploring ways to improve the inventory adjustment feature on Moka. The insights will also be used to inform potential opportunities for advanced inventory features on Moka.
This research was mainly conducted by the research team, while my role as the designer was involved in the research plan and shadowing the interview sessions with merchants.
Secondary Research
To support the foundational research planning, I do secondary research such as the competitive analysis, this meant I had to utilize features of other competitors similar to ours while also reviewing over the current advanced adjustment flow. This helps us to create a better hypothesis and what to expect for our overall design.
how to design an advanced adjustment feature
Understanding the Users
F&B Merchant
Merchants that operate in the F&B sector typically have more complex inventory needs in menu ingredients, and adjustments was done when any item waste is found. Due to managing fast-moving items, stock checking is performed daily.
Characteristics of F&B Merchants related to Inventory Management:
- Manages fast-moving items
- Performs daily-weekly stock checking, following their restock cycle.
- Usually have fewer products/ items compared to retail.
- Full-Service Restaurant outlets also tend to have more menu varieties compared to Quick-service Restaurants.
- Stock checking is normally done at the outlet level, performed by staff to request for replenishment of menu item ingredients.
- Inventory complexity in F&B merchants is usually due to managing ingredient-level inventory. Stock adjustments are usually performed due to waste (expired items, spills, and/or missing items).
- Larger multi-outlet F&B businesses may have dedicated admin/staff to do stock checking for multiple outlets and perform PO to headquarters or suppliers.
Retail Merchant
In general, retail merchants manage a high number and high variety of items/ products. Their inventory needs revolve around managing inventory flow and detailed information on various products sold. Their main goal to use inventory systems is to quickly and accurately identify and track inventory.
Characteristics of Retail merchants related to Inventory Management:
- Manages slower-moving items
- Manages a high number of products
- Typically performs stock checking in the monthly cycle (less frequent than F&B). Larger retail businesses may do global stock checking in longer cycles (e.g. quarterly, semesterly)
- Stock checking activity for retail merchants usually demands high effort due to the number of items and breakdown of products to their Stock Keeping Units (size, color, etc.)
- Barcode scanners are often used in retail to accelerate product identification and minimize human error.
Pain points in using the Adjustment feature in Moka
- For some merchants, frequency in using adjustment is only necessary when there is an issue in the warehouse or a discrepancy.
- Hassles in finding intended items to adjust
- Limited adjustment history information
- Difficulty separating between item adjustments because of some reasons (e.g supplier returns, waste/loss, etc)
Problem Statements
Based on the research insights, we try to group the user needs and pain points and translate it into focused problem statements and then we agreed on these main topics, including:
- Ease of filling in the regular stock checklist
- Increase security and fraud prevention
- Ease of monitor and investigation whenever there is stock movement
The Goals
Business goals: Retain existing merchants
Several merchants have sounded their concerns and complaint about this adjustment. Since this feature is the most used feature in Inventory.
User goal: Help existing merchants to do stock checking in a more efficient manner
This improvement will impact how merchants use adjustments for stock checking. The improvement will help merchants to do the stock checking faster and get a more accurate report.
| Goals | Metrics |
|---|---|
| Retain existing merchants | • # of merchants use adjustment • # of adjustment creation |
| Help existing merchants to do stock checking in a more efficient manner | • #time needed for stock checking submission request • Success rate to finish user flow • User satisfaction |
Ideation
Team meetings were regularly held to align our expectations. As a designer, I would take initiative to reach out to team members making sure everyone was involved and progress was being made.
In the ideation phase, it is important to understand what exactly users will want to accomplish when using advanced adjustment features. I created user stories to give the team a clear vision of what goals need to achieve.
- How to help merchants to fill in the daily stock checklist?
- How to increase security and fraud prevention in the inventory adjustment process?
- How to support merchants easily monitor and investigate whenever there is stock movement?
Design
Having understood the problems and the proposed solution ideas, I started to translate them into wireframes, user flow, and high-fidelity design. And this is the general comparison of the feature improvement.
User Flow
High Fidelity Design
Specify roles for who can access or be responsible for each process of adjustment.
This feature helps users to focus on responsibilities and fraud prevention.
Fill in the daily stock checklist using the adjustment form or stock-checking template.
The adjustment request form helps users quickly find, identify, and select items that need to be checked and/ or adjusted.
Investigate stock movement and monitor loss using adjustment Reports.
Adjustment report integrated with the inventory system helps users to track overall business performance due to adjustments and take the right decisions if it is necessary.
Back office (Desktop) Preview
Design Handoff
At the end of the design iteration, I conduct the design walkthrough with developers to make an alignment for the design implementation. And also it’s important to us to make sure that our design it’s easy for developers to understand. I reviewed the flow of all screens and notes were added so that even without viewing the prototype, they can still understand how the interaction. The arrows give context on how the flow moves from one screen to the next, while specs were also added to provide measurements for all the UI elements and padding. This reduces any uncertainty that developers may have about the overall design.
Results
Before we go to the development phase, we conducted usability testing in order to validate our solution. In general usability finding, we found that:
- Advanced Adjustment for stock checking purposes is perceived as a new concept in Moka for merchants.
- Adjustment in Moka is mainly viewed as a tool for modifying/ altering inventory quantity due to reasons such as waste, spoilage, lost items, etc. However, the frequency and number of items to be adjusted are usually few, and happen occasionally.
- Adjustment for stock checking refers to the process before modifying inventory amount, which happens more regularly. Merchants usually “check” or monitor ending quantity with physical quantity. Applying this process through the system would need additional handholding to understand and relate the value and usage of the feature to merchants, so that they may aid their current stock-checking process.
From the usability testing result, we know that the biggest challenge is how to educate merchants about the new features. Apart from doing the design iteration, we also realized that the solution is not only come from the design but also the other functions (e.g Account manager, Sales, CS, etc), so to make alignment with them will also important to answer the challenge.
Currently, this project is still in the development phase once the feature is launched we will focus on metrics related to retaining merchants and improving the user experience. As a designer, I also collaborate with products to make sure all the UX metrics need to track so that we can learn what needs to be improved in the future.
Learnings
This project taught me the importance of doing proper research. Building upon your knowledge by being involved in observing the merchants’ inventory process directly and really trying to understand their needs will help you to design a better product. Communicating frequently and keeping your team informed about what you are doing also keeps everyone on the same page. I also learned a lot about how to make the design handoff process more smooth and reduce any uncertainty that usually happens by providing more detailed UI documentation. It was a rewarding experience overall as we managed to come up with a solution to any problem we encountered
Let’s connect
I excited to talk with passionate people like you. So, let’s build something together or just say hello to me. I’d love to reply, share & gather insights with you. 🤟
© 2023 Ivana Elisa All Rights Reserved
Ivana Elisa 