Product Placement System
Place Products in Displays Before Purchasing
Project Type
UI/UX Design
System Design
Role
UI/UX Designer
The Problem
Gas station/Convenient store owners have to use spreadsheets in order to know how much product to buy for display shelves, taking hours of time each week.
Background
A client came to us with a problem, their customers were struggling with ordering products each week for their stores. These stores have thousands of different items sold, items like keychains, phone charges, ashtrays, and more.
These store owners spend hours a week trying to predict how much product they should order. A lot of these owners use excel spreadsheets to track what products they need to buy and the quantity. What if there was an easier, visual process to order the products you need?
Constraint: 40 hours to create a high-fidelity mockup.
Research
The research process for this concept was unique, there are no other competitors with a concept or technology like this. The research shifted towards other systems that allowed users to drag items into space and try and visualize in 3D how things may work and respond. A large part of the inspiration came from systems like Menards Design & Buy for decks. The concept behind this tool works well and could fit the client's needs without being extremely costly.
"Ease of use may be invisible, but its absence sure isn't."
- IBM
Easy, Fast, Visual
This product placement system now allows the user to do a handful of things.
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Users start by entering the size of the display they want to fill.
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From there, users choose if they need to purchase shelving or they can choose to enter their own into the system.
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Users then can arrange the shelves accordingly.
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From there, users are able to search and add products to their display.
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Users can see the total cost, amount of products that it will take to fill the display, product details, and products they can add. Users are able to adjust the quantity of a product by simply clicking on it to pull u product details.
Once a user is happy with their plan, they can add all planned items to their cart with a click of a button, or they can save their plan for the future.
Conclusion
This part of the project is just a proof of concept. This product placement system will continue to be worked on, which will allow for user testing. User testing will provide valuable information on what is working well with this concept and what needs to be changed. I look forward to pushing this system further and creating a simple and fast way for store owners to plan their displays.