Sparked high-value, user-centered product iterations
Company
Trove Recommerce
Year
2024
Timeline
2 weeks
Role
Sole researcher
A team of 3PL warehouse associates being trained on the SaaS product. Our operations team strongly advised 3PLs to procure touch-enabled desktop monitors so associates could input data as quickly as possible.
Introduction
This is the story of how I took the initiative to lead a guerrilla diary study and amplified the voice of the user in the product development process.
Background
Trove had just launched its SaaS product to its first batch of external users, its network of third-party logistics providers (3PLs). A redesign of tedious legacy software, the new SaaS product (with a new design system) enabled the scale of Trove’s resale operations programs with its workflow management tooling for administrators and efficiency-optimized flows for associates.
Thanks to my existing relationships with the operations team, I learned from a passing comment that a training team was onsite with a 3PL, the first external warehouse team to be using our new SaaS product.
Challenge
While launching the product in external warehouses was a big milestone, the operations and product teams hadn’t communicated clearly about how we’d capture user feedback. We were used to having our internal operations team available to give us their perspective. Without a clear plan or ownership, the opportunity to capture fresh user feedback from newly trained 3PL users would be lost.
Solution
Diary study in Google Docs
Recognizing the urgency of the situation, I immediately reached out to the lead of the onsite trainings and asked them to keep an informal diary in a Google Doc, incorporating feedback from associates as much as they could. Because the operations team, especially lower-level supervisors like the training lead, was so time-constrained, my goal was to minimize the work that the training lead had to do to support my research. I reviewed each day’s diary entry, highlighting insights and adding comments with questions and observations. At the end of the week-long training, I compiled our notes and generated a series of potential enhancements that would address the pain points and desires expressed in the study.
Virtual workshop in FigJam
Once the diary study was complete, I organized a virtual workshop in FigJam so that the operations team could give their feedback on what was the biggest priority for them. Again thinking of our time pressures and seeking to maximize our live time together, I prepared a preread so that the team would be able to roll right into the workshop. They were asked to review the enhancement ideas plotted in the FigJam and prepare any questions or talking points for the discussion.
A screenshot of the FigJam file used for the prioritization workshop with the operations team (blurred to protect the privacy of participants)
During the workshop, we used dot voting to surface areas of alignment. Among these, we landed on a set of three top enhancements that would most improve the UX for the warehouse operations users:
App-wide, multi-language translations*
Validation to prevent users from scanning items into the wrong locations
A pace tracker to keep users focused on efficiency
*Although operations managers preferred a custom solution, I knew from prior observations that users were already familiar with Google Translate (whether that was with the in-browser feature, at translate.google.com, or in Google search results). I tested how well our application would perform with in-browser translations and found that it would completely crash with at certain interaction points. I captured screenshots and listed steps to reproduce so that I could pass these forward to the rest of the product development team.
Persona insight
Warehouse associates are virtually 100% ESL
ESL (English as a Second Language)-speaking, or multilingual, users make up the vast majority of the warehouse associate population. Most associates in Trove’s network spoke Spanish as a first language.
This is part of the reason it was so important to build highly intuitive and visual experiences for the people that processed Trove’s resale inventory. We needed to make it as easy possible for them to learn new software and workflows, then develop the confidence to become power users.
A persona card that I created during the discovery phase of the SaaS product MVP to help the team empathize with our Warehouse Associate users
Research report in Confluence
To socialize the research process and findings, I wrote up and published a report in Confluence. I then organized a meeting with the product manager and engineering manager to discuss the results and determine next steps. They were enthusiastic to see the top three enhancements highlighted in a digestible format and helped to define the scope for each.
We agreed that an MVP for multi-language translations would be an entire quarter’s worth of work, which the team didn’t have capacity for at the time. However, we aligned on a near-term solution, to fix the bugs I discovered with the in-browser translations. I created a bug ticket in Jira and added my screenshots/steps.
They were surprised and worried to hear that wrong-location validations weren’t working as expected, as we had built that functionality into the MVP that launched internally months ago. No one had raised the issue before, so why was it an issue now? It turned out that the validations were not fully checking for proper locations; they were only checking for location types. This small yet critical distinction was surfaced thanks to our research, and fixed in the next sprint.
Lastly, the pace tracker feature was already designed and ready, but it was descoped from the MVP solution. While the team understood the value of the pace tracker, especially since the internal operations team had less visibility over the productivity of external teams, it was blocked until a bug was fixed with time-tracking functionality.
Once these decisions were made and ownership/next steps were clear, I communicated them back to the operations team with a timeline of when they could expect the near-term fixes for in-browser translations and location validations.
Results
Improved user satisfaction and productivity by supporting multilingual users
Reduced errors by adding validation to prevent misplaced items
Thank you for making the time to recap today. Your sincere commitment to improving our apps continues to be underscored. You read carefully through all of the information I had for you, and you effortlessly drew on key points and themes that made our discussions much more effective.
Sergio Mendoza-Medrano
Training Supervisor, Warehouse Operations @ Trove
Next steps
I facilitated a FigJam workshop with the Product department to discuss opportunities to improve our operations product research processes.
My recommendations:
Define a leaner, more systematic research process attached to training with 3PLs
Tap into existing research touchpoints that UX was historically excluded from, e.g. we could tack on a UX review session to quarterly program reviews with 3PLs
Create a panel of operations advisors to continuously gain market insights and experiment with beta features, before releasing them to warehouses across the U.S. and Canada
Critique
In the spirit of continuous improvement, here’s what I would do differently next time:
Quantitative metrics: Track specific, quantifiable metrics to measure the business impact of my design improvements on efficiency and user satisfaction – then convey this impact to leadership.
Direct user engagement: Incorporate opportunities for direct interaction with end-users, such as brief video calls or surveys, to complement the diary entries.
