Nick's Portfolio

Inventory presented a massive challenge. This app had the potential to be our competitive edge, but poor usability was a common customer pain point. The app was over-engineered, buggy and difficult to navigate making it especially difficult for full-service properties with thousands of room assets to manage. Another complication was that our legacy code prevented us from giving inventory a proper overhaul or even allowing the flexibility to introduce a global search feature. While our engineers reconfigured data and API endpoints I collaborated with our product team to incrementally rollout UX enhancements.

Challenge

Phase 1 solution

Phase I Solution A high value add was offing a bulk add feature which allowed users to add assets to multiple locations vs having to click into each location. This feature continues to save our customers and support staff hours of time when configuring assets for full-service hotels. We also introduced inline editing to reduce the number of clicks it takes to edit an asset by up to 50%. Phase II Solution This phase involves introducing cleaner UI, improving navigation by adding breadcrumbs and clearing up page labels and terminology to reduce confusion.

Figure 3: Phase I Bulk Add Feature

Phase 2 solution

Phase III Solution Our phase III solution would involve introducing a global search feature, which would resolve our most common pain point of findability. Figure 5 captures the search flows I established to find assets. I suggested we introduce an auto suggest feature that would index assets by brand, type, location, etc. Future Exploration During this time I also collaborated with our team lead to introduce a next-gen POC. I presented a fluid, full page experience that included panel flyouts to reduce the depth of Inventory and interconnect the product entirely by allowing users to easily view work orders, purchase orders and location history associated with assets.

Figure 4: Style & Layout Enhancements

Outcome

Inventory is an ongoing challenge as we’re in the midst of the refresh, but based on feedback our solutions are garnering small wins by improving customer satisfaction and saving our support staff time.