Process

This is the process which I followed while starting to work on this project. Following this process was very helpful in every step to carry out this project in the most organized and effective way.

Overview

Smiota is a startup that offers package tracking and storage solutions for colleges, medium to large scale businesses and residential properties.

Challenge

A central off-site mailroom application is needed to help tackle the most complex package and mail delivery challenges. An application has to be designed which can help to do the following:

• Design and manage workflow of the mailroom employees

• Create custom package statuses

• Set allowed transitions of the packages

• Provide special instructions for packages and recipients

Though this application will be used by many of Smiota’s clients and will be customised accordingly, this particular project was taken into 3 month sprint process to rope in FACEBOOK as our client.

How Might We..

Designing the mailroom application around the ‘Chain of Custody’ concept where every transfer of evidence from person to person is documented and is provable.

• USER PERSONA

Mailroom staff / employees

The main users of the Mailroom Pro app will be the mailroom staff/employees.

• RESEARCH

User research was quintessential, in order to understand the user needs better. Various research methods were used which helped me with great insights to make smooth and hassle free user experience for the users.

After collaborating with the marketing, customer service, product manager and QA teams, I got a fair idea and understanding of how the previous smiota mailroom standard app worked.

The basic process is as follows:

Once the basic process was clear, the next step was to approach our end users to know their pain points.

On Site Visit

I along with my VP of engineer and dev team visited the mailroom warehouse of FACEBOOK. This step in the research process was very crucial as we got to know the pain points of our users which further helped us with detailed insights to design mailroom pro app.

The onsite visit was basically to understand the 'Arrival' to 'Delivery' needs of the user and the current flow which mailroom staff uses. 

In order to prepare for our onsite visit, we roughly prepared a set of questions which needed clarifications and were of prime importance in order to understand the overall needs for designing new solution.

Feature Analysis

After gathering all the data, I got a clear view as to which features were important to be a part of MVP process. Therefore I started listing down all the important features after analyzing the data which would make a way into the final design solution.

Key Strategies

In order to make ‘Mailroom Pro’ more powerful and useful some of the key strategies are as follows

Client Configuration

With all the research in hand, I explored many ways that Smiota was serving their customers and I ended up finding 6 "configuration types" that they were supporting, with a bunch of smaller customizations tailored to each client. For the purposes of the Mailroom Pro, we decided to focus on the large scale business configuration since we were pitching in for a huge social media client, like Facebook.

Key Modules

Based on all the ideation and discussion with the team, I realized that the Mailroom Pro app had more in depth modules to be designed. The key modules were as follows:-

1) Arrival Packages (Mobile)

2) Receive Packages (Web)

3) Manage Packages (Web)

4) Release Packages (Mobile)

5) Dashboard And Settings (Web)

Constructing Solutions

At this stage, I was joined in by another UI/UX designer on board who was hired as the company was expanding. In order to meet the project goals on time, project manager got new designer to be a part of this project.

I discussed and shared all the information, research, initial designs/sketches with him. We both collaborated on this project seamlessly to achieved the desired results. We were given to lead different modules in order to finish the designs and deliver on time.

In this section I will highlight the modules designed by me. Each of the module have had 2 sets of design, 1st version which got tested and 2nd version was final with implemented changes

Arrival

The main goal on the package arrival process is getting off packages from the truck and getting into the systems as quickly as possible. In order to achieve this, we designed an interaction that stores the package data locally in the browser and tries to sync to a server on a 2 second interval. This helps the staff to focus on the task of scanning packages quickly and getting into the systems and worry less if they are using the software correctly.

Receive Packages

Once all the packages are scanned in the system at arrival point, packages are received on desktop. Therefore a web version is designed for this. In this step, packages can be set on various statuses too, like for example, the package can be set in transit status. Below find high fidelity mockup screens of RECEIVE STANDARD flow according to the needs requested by the users.

Prototype

Key technicalities taken into the consideration at receive stage

• Building a mechanism to update package status

• Alert feature to let the staff know if the same tracking number is scanned twice

• Ability to enter package in the system if it is not scanned during the arrival stage

• Ability to provide special instructions for the package

Project Learning

Working on this project was a surely an enthralling journey for me. This was one of the most demanding project during my time in this organization. In the course of researching the mailroom app process at the client’s mailroom warehouse, I came to understand the entire process of how the mails get received to the point of delivery at the desk/doorstep of its employees. I gained lot of knowledge of how mailroom warehouses run.
 

I also learnt that Collaboration is key. Collaborating with the developers and project manager, I was able to focus on how the users would interact with the new app. Learning the key difference of how the existing app was used vs how the new app would be used was huge. This was possible because we as a team were very passionate of bringing this new design to our users. I worked closely with the project manager to make sure my contributions of the UX perspective were cohesive and easy for the developers to implement the design solutions. We had more work to do based on the requirements of the users. I realised that once we had web application ready, some parts of the process were purely handled on mobile device. Therefore we developed this further into android / IOS app too. 

My contract with the company came to an end after working on various projects for a year. We as a team only had 3 months to design and develop this application successfully. The good news is, currently the design is being used by the clients and is running successfully. I feel on cloud nine when I finally witnessed my design being shipped successfully and the company got client like Facebook onboard.