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ShipStation • 2019 • 6 weeks
ShipStation: Helping warehouse managers efficiently organize orders
How might we enable warehouse managers to organize incoming orders quickly and efficiently so that they can ship out all of their customers orders out the door?
01. Company
ShipStation is a fulfillment management platform for online sellers.
Users can import their online orders from different selling channels and marketplaces to fulfill their orders from ShipStation. They can shop rates, verify addresses, buy shipping labels, buy order insurance, and manage inventory from one platform.
02. Overview
From Order Import to Label Purchase
The original "ShipStation" was first launched as an eBay plugin in 2012 with the mission of helping online merchants ship efficiently. Since then there has been tremendous growth. Now, ShipStation has to support different types and sizes of users (Small to Enterprise).
03. Discovery
Getting Started
To align engineering, product, and design, I went over a design brief to figure out the why, who, when, where, what, and how.
People Problem
Currently, organizing thousands of orders is very time-consuming for merchants. Merchants spent on average 4 hours per day organizing orders.
High Level Goal
Design ways to help merchants easily and efficiently organize their orders. Once their orders are organized, enable users to quickly purchase labels and ship out these orders.
User Groups
Warehouse Manager
Olivia is a warehouse manager. She is the primary ShipStation user and organizes all the orders that come in and assigns them to warehouse workers on the floor. She makes sure all the orders get fulfilled accurately. She also helps out with picking and packing during the busy shipping season.
Warehouse Worker (Picker & Packer)
Jose is a Picker & Packer. He follows tasks that the Shipping Manager assigns him to do. He recieves order invoices for each order and picks out products into a bin. He usually has a couple of specific tasks that he has to do every day.
04. Research
Understanding Workflows
I wanted to learn more about how, where, and why ShipStation users were organizing orders. To eliminate bias, I asked ShipStation experts (executives, support, and sales) after phone interviews and on-site visits.
Survey
The goal of this survey was to:
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1. Find out how and why merchants were grouping orders.
2. Identify their biggest pain points and needs.
Survey Highlights
How do you organize orders?
Features frequently used
Why are you organizing orders the way you do?
Features Reqested Relating to Order Organization
Onsite Visits
The goal of the visits was to understand why and how merchants were organizing orders and better understand their shipping workflows.
Shipping Workflows
There are a lot of different shipping workflows. However, there are a couple of ways merchants organize orders.
Workflow #1: Traditional online retailer
Workflow #2: Retailers that have orders with similar composition
05. Define
Pain Points, Metrics & More
The next step is to compile all the different customer pain points to find patterns so that I can prioritize which pain points to target first.
Pain Points
1. Takes too long to organize all orders that need to be shipped out for the day.
2. Prioritizing orders is a bit difficult when I start the day
Needs
1. Automated and efficient way to prioritize orders that needs to be shipped out for the day.
Success Metrics
1. 📉 Spend less time organizing orders.
2. 📈 More labels being purchased in a shorter amount of time.
06. Ideation
Iterating and Communicating
Once the team defined all the pain points, needs, and success metrics, I started drawing up ideas to target our user's pain points. I also designed to hit our success metrics.
Ideas
1. Sorting columns (Updating existing UX)
2. Grouping orders by similarity (New feature)
3. Managing filters users don't use (New feature)
4. Automation rules (New feature, however too much lift)
5. Saved "views" combination of filters, groups & sorted columns (New feature)
07. Solution
Turning Ideas into Reality
Turning wireframes into designs
Group by
Filtering
Sort By
Batches (Bulk Purchase & Print Shipping Labels)
08. Conclusion
Project Results
Due to changes in management, the new design system was halted and direction was changed. Implemented UX using the old design system in place. I started seeing a 30% reduction in time spent using the old designs.
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The next step to make ShipStation more efficient would be through easier automation. This way users can set automation once and the software will do 80% of the heavy lifting (Sorting, filtering, etc.)
Overview
Discovery
Define
Company
Research
Ideation
Solution
Conclusion
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