Designing a mobile solution for stocktaking with Phorest.
Have you ever looked forward to a day spent counting products on a shelf? I’m sure a small percentage of you may be thrilled at the prospect but for the majority (myself included) it’s as exciting as a queue at the post office!
I joined the team at Phorest 11 weeks ago and within 48hrs I was sitting with our clients, in their salons, discussing the finer details of stocktaking. A week later we were testing prototypes and within two months we had the feature built and ready to ship!
One of the best things I’ve experienced so far at Phorest (there are a number of them) has been the desire for the whole company to constantly engage with our customers to ensure that everything we do is about making their business better for them, their team and their clients.
We’re not perfect
Phorest is a pretty comprehensive solution but we understand that it can always be better for our customers — just look at our UserVoice page. Along with great appointment booking and marketing functionality Phorest also has the (not so sexy) reporting, stock and inventory features.
Stocktaking and reconciling a stocktake is one of the only areas in the product where we actually recommend to our customers to use pen and paper! It was time to create a better solution to this problem.
So how do we reach a solution?
When designing solutions at Phorest it is not left to the Product Designers to simply think of something amazing! Designing a new feature is a collaborative effort.
There are a number of phases involved in designing a solution. The first phase is all about gathering requirements, exploring ideas and approaches.
1. Defining the problem
I have always found it crucial to gather together stakeholders from various sides of the organisation when approaching a new feature. Having a group of smart people, who really know their customers, is a key ingredient in ensuring the initial idea is off to the best possible start.
At Phorest we started with a kick-off session to discuss how we would like to approach this issue. Here we explored our take on what stocktaking on mobile would be for our customers. We read through various stock related feedback we had received over the years from customers on Uservoice. We also explored the current capabilities of our technologies to deliver a solution that could make life easier for our customers.
We asked questions about the entire process. Who carries out the stocktake? How do they do it? Is it brand by brand, room by room? One big one a year or a small section every week?
We looked at how people currently use Phorest to complete stocktakes and what aspects were painful for our users.
2. Get out and talk to our customers
The great thing about designing at Phorest is that there are a huge number of customers within a 10–15 minute walk of our offices, always happy to discuss any ideas you have on how to make their lives a little easier using Phorest. After our discussions in the office we visited a number of salons to ask them how they managed their stock, who did stocktakes, was the mobile solution a good idea and would it help them in their business on a day to day basis.
Getting out and speaking to our customers revealed things that we would not have considered (duh!). A key consideration was around access and permission. Junior staff members are usually the people doing the stocktake. They many not have access to everything on our Phorest Go app so how would this work with permissions in Phorest? Applying stocktakes to the system is normally done by a senior staff member so how can we maintain this yet allow junior members to be involved? These conversations with customers also highlighted a number of issues that we hope to overcome with our new mobile solution to stocktakes:
- Printed lists hurt more than they help
The items on the list are not in the same order as they are on the shelf so some people waste a lot of time walking back and forth between shelves marking off each item on the list. - If it’s not on the shelf it’s not counted
Sometimes products are shown as being in stock in the system but if they are not on the shelf they don’t get counted. - Too many cooks spoil the stocktake
When counting items in the salon some managers do it all themselves to avoid any confusion over counting the same thing twice. - It just takes too long
By far the number one reason for making this (and anything) better is that something this boring would be so much better if it didn’t take so long!
In the book Inspired by Marty Cagan (read it if you can, he’s a big hit here with the product team), he quotes Jeff Bonforte of Yahoo when trying to explain how product managers can come up with ideas and business opportunities that are more than just making incremental changes to your product.
I like my Product Managers to focus on the most miserable thing people have to deal with every day. If you can solve that problem, that actually changes behaviour, then that can lead to truly big product wins.
I definitely think stocktaking and the process of doing a stocktake fits the bill here. Based on our initial discussions and the feedback we received from customers we knew that we needed to pull together a design based on all the information we gathered. This moved us into the next stage of our process, testing our theories using prototypes and using feedback to update and improve those prototypes until we are happy with our solution.
3. Outline a proposed solution and question everything
Creating an initial proposal is all about pulling something together with the expectation that’s going to be torn apart. It is not a time to be precious about your design decisions as everything can be changed in an instant. As you can see above we created a lot of screens, full of all our ideas - a lot of them didn’t make it!
We currently have a Phorest Go application for our customers so they can basically manage their business from the palm of their hand. It’s quite a powerful solution and we would need to discuss with our customers how best to integrate the solution with the current functionality. For this reason and to simplify testing we designed a stand alone application for stocktaking. This would allow our feedback to just focus on the act of doing a stocktake and hopefully give us some really good insights into what works and what doesn’t work.
Our go to combination for design and prototyping in Phorest is Sketch and InVision. It allows us the freedom to quickly get our designs into the hands of our customers in a way they can easily interact with and offer key insights and feedback. Once initial designs were ready we hooked them up with InVision and shared it with the team and our customers. Click on the image below to check out our initial prototype:
3. Refine your solution
Usually the initial design contains every “great idea” and suggestion. It allows us to see how everything would work together but through testing and feedback you can start to think about what parts are crucial to the success of your design and what’s extra or unnecessary. Usually it’s these extras that end up causing the most confusion for users and heartache for developers. For me it’s important to get the basics right, and then release.
Keeping your initial release skinny and focused allows you and your team to move quickly to get the feature into production but also allows ample room for feedback on that initial release and continual improvement. Bundling every idea and suggestion into that first release could leave you with a lot of headaches once the user feedback starts to roll in.
Some of our initial concepts included: defining locations in a business to do stocktakes, creating standalone apps for all businesses (not just Phorest clients), notifications, brand category filters and more. All of which are probably great additions but we can still release a great update for our customers, that solves a problem they are having while leaving room for feedback and further development.
Our feedback from testing with the InVision prototype allowed us to determine what was important for customers.
Once we had updated our designs we updated the InVision prototype and created a video to share with the team and customers. Using Intercom we asked users to watch the video and leave us their feedback.
Below is the video we created to share with customers and some of the feedback. Obviously the feedback I put here is all 5 star stuff but we did get some great feedback that wasn’t so positive which allowed us to refine our designs before putting any code into production.
4. Implementing your design
Before writing the user stories and working with development on the implementation of our ideas we revisited our initial criteria to ensure the proposed design was solving real problems for our customers.
In the initial discovery phase we uncovered a number of real world issues that we had to overcome to ensure the app would work for our customers.
Permissions Issues
With regard to allowing junior staff members to create and update stocktakes we made the decision to design the application in a way that would not require any permission. Any user with access to the Phorest Go app can start a stocktake, count items, leave notes and submit the stocktake. To ensure senior management have full control over the application of stocktakes, only users with access to stocktakes on our desktop app can reconcile and apply them. We felt that this would be a frictionless way of introducing this update to our customers.
Removing the paper
Knowing what you want to count is important and keeping track of each item counted is equally important. For this reason we created filters for stocktakes so you can create a list based on the stock type (Retail, Professional or Colour stock) and based on the brand. This way you could count 10 or 100 items, it’s up to you. Simply look at your list to se what’s left and submit it when you’re ready.
Counting missing items
When you’ve finished counting there may be items on the list that you did not find. We made it really easy for people to mark all these items as 0 with a single click. This way you can quickly reconcile all those items that the system is showing as in stock when in reality there is nothing there.
Multiple people counting
The problem with multiple people doing a stocktake is that items could be counted twice. By simply showing the current count of an item, each time you scan it, users could be sure if the item had been already counted. It also helps having a recently counted section so users can quickly see if something has already been counted.
Completing the task quickly
The main reason for creating a mobile answer to stocktaking was speed. Allowing users to simply scan an item, enter a number and move on to the next one should have a drastic impact on how long it takes to complete a stocktake versus their current method. We were also able to tackle other issues like brands constantly changing barcodes on products every time there is a change to the packaging. Now when you scan an item, we simply ask you what it is, and once you save it we will record that barcode so the next time you scan we know exactly what the product is.
Next Steps
Feature updates like this should allow customers to spend a lot less time doing miserable tasks on a daily basis and get back to the thing that makes them successful - taking care of their clients.
Having released a few builds internally and to select customers using Testflight, the next step for us it to release this app to all customers (which is happening as I type 😮). Then we can measure success buy gathering feedback and seeing what we can improve for the next release. We will also use this information to analyse what we did well as a team and what can be improved upon for our next piece of work.
We’re currently on the lookout for Product Designers to join the team, if you are interested please get in touch by emailing product@phorest.com.
Mikey Cannon
Product Designer at Phorest
