Ensuring the outputs (UI/Dashboard) connect with the business outcomes (faster shipping and delivery) and match the users’ mental model.

Led the research efforts and visited THD’s warehouses several times to observe and understand the operations and the leaders’ behaviors, motivations, fears and goals which informed the design decisions.

Worked with another UX Designer and designed the UI flows and interaction patterns to visualize complex information in a meaningful way.

Home Depot has been investing in next generation fulfillment centers with a more streamlined supply chain operations to meet the Same-day / Next-day delivery expectations to its online and pro customers. To help the facility leaders manage the operations within the building, the business needed a new dashboard to provide necessary operational visibility.

Information was scattered across 5 different apps and multiple reports in the legacy software platform. Along with this, the legacy software was not built to provide the right operational visibility to the newer facilities. The leaders had to spend 15-20 seconds to take action on a single customer order, which at scale, was unacceptable.

At the time of research there were no next-generation facilities that were fully operational. As a result, nobody knew what to expect during full volume scenarios and there were a lot of assumptions flying all around. The challenge was to differentiate between what the business and users really wanted and what they said they wanted.

Given the broad scope of the problem, the research and design process mainly involved a lot of trips to the fulfillment centers to understand the business and operations, a lot of interviews and asking Whys, and a lot of back-and-forth ideation and evaluation of hypotheses.

The main goals the business wanted to achieve with this initiative were:

To learn more about the users and the operational processes, we made multiple trips to an existing facility in Chicago and shadowed them as they managed customer orders. The biggest need for the leaders were:

Having understood the operations and the leaders’ mental model, we had clarity on what user-problem we were trying to solve. Through a series of sketching and whiteboarding sessions, I was able to quickly brainstorm ideas to answer the questions and uncover more questions that we needed further understanding on.

While showing all the order/region status information to the leaders sounds like a good idea at first, it’s counter-intuitive. It would overwhelm the leaders with too much information and there’s a risk they might miss something. It was important to understand what actions they take, when and what information helps them take those actions.

The answer lied in their behavior - Each leader would manage a certain part of the building and they would focus on order status within their regions for the most part. However, occasionally they’d jump in to help other leaders if their regions are doing well / low on work.

To afford that behavior, I thought of showing information in layers - Allowing the leaders to choose the regions they’re working on but also provide visibility to the status of the other regions on demand.

We explored multiple ways to visualize the order pool and picking status information through progressive disclosure and different header styles showing overall building status.

It was a challenge to balance information density with the level of useful detail. Along with that, we also had to keep the MVP goals in mind and not get carried away by designing too many things in the first iteration. Thirdly, we wanted to maintain visual consistency with the other existing apps and not design too many new patterns and interactions. After multiple iterations and careful design and engineering considerations, we had arrived at our solution hypothesis that we tested with the leaders at a THD warehouse. The testing helped us identify the gaps in usability and data shown.

Based on the learnings from the studies, I made changes to our MVP hypothesis and created the final visual mockups using The Home Depot’s Pallet design system

So we have the mockups ready, Great! But how do we know this is the right solution?

Despite all the testing and iterations, the MVP is still not used or even tested by the people it is intended to be used by and in an environment that it’s intended to be used in. But eventually when it does go live, we’d measure success by looking out for some key indicators:

Active listening is a key part of any research and it impacts every corner of the product. Quite literally in this case. During the interviews with the leaders, they frequently mentioned that they check the 'pulse' of the building when describing their goal. At the time we were looking for a new name for the platform and calling it 'Pulse' seemed apt. I quickly explored a few logo options and we settled on the one below.

This was one of the most challenging projects I’ve had the opportunity to work on because of the ambiguous nature of the project. I started on this project with a clean slate and there was an ocean of information in front of me. This project helped me improve my listening skills and find ways to separate useful information from the noise.

Staying curious and getting an intimate understanding of the operations and the leaders’ jobs helped me greatly. Through the process of inquiry and learning, I was able to gain insights into how the leaders work and what helps them be successful which informed the design decisions.

This, by no means was a single-person job. I am also very thankful to my teammates and the leadership at The Home Depot who supported me through this effort. Good leadership starts with trust and I am glad my leadership allowed me to work fearlessly and make many mistakes in search of the right answers.