LINQ Item Management Redesign

A school nutrition inventory management based software that manages inventory, tracks USDA foods, tracks individual ingredients and recipes, purchasing information and POS settings.

Overview

Item management is a module of LINQ’s nutrition software that manages inventory, helps track USDA foods, lays the building blocks for menu planning, purchasing, and the point of service system.

I was the sole designer that lead the extensive discovery of where the current system fell short to the full redesign and enhancement of the module.

Tasks & Duration

I was the sole designer on this project over the course of 5 months. A senior ux researcher conducted some of the interviews in the first round.

My tasks included 3+ rounds of interviews with 9 districts each round, continuous internal interviews with support, training managers, client relationship managers, and product, user flow creation, wireframes, high fidelity mockups, and development interaction.

My Redesign Process

Discovery

The problem relayed from product was that there was confusion of user establishing the units of measure, or the building block of the item which causes many issues when assigning additional item attributes.

So the first step for me is the discovery phase. This was a big undertaking. I needed to fully understand the breadth of item management, what was the functionality, the user flow, essentially really take a deep dive into the product. Once I had a grasp on that, I needed to understand the product goals as well as the users’ goals and current pain points so that I could address those issues and improve this design and improve their day to day interaction.

So that I could feel comfortable and to find a good starting point, I sat in product demos and training sessions. I conducted interviews with product, support, training managers, and client relationship managers. In addition to these interviews, I created a current user work flow to understand how this module worked and conducted a page by page detailed analysis.

I created a research plan to gather research from my target audience. I sent out a survey through Pendo, our analytics software, to identify overarching pain points from a large range of frequent users. I also used these surveys to recruit at least 5-7 nutritions managers of districts of varying sizes. For theses interviews I conducted a usability test and created 7 tasks to gauge how users completed these tasks.

Examples of the tasks for the usability test included:

Manually add an inventoried and purchased item that is used by all buildings using the given details. (Users were given an example item.)
Add ingredient and simple recipe attributes to this item.
A new alternative version of this item is now available. Make a copy of this item using the given details.

Defining the Problem

After 10+ hours of interviews, I organized the feedback by pain point, by negative and positive sentiments, by key word, etc. I then compiled an insight based on the findings.

Some Key findings gathered from the interviews were:

Users desire more control and flexibility in managing item, including creating, editing, deleting, deactiving and merging an item.
Item rights and measures is overly complex with lack of flexibility for adjustments.
The system is cumbersome and workflow is unclear, causing the need to jump around and revisit pages/steps.
The copying process is a painpoint and users want a more selective copying process.
The lack of proper editing capabilities, and error correction cause compounding issues amongst staff.
Users need the software to track price history, and update prices across multiple items.

Quotes from Interviews

“Honestly, the item rights and measures makes me angry everytime”

— Nutrition Manager from large district

“I think if you could copy an item and that unit of measure not carry over, and just start fresh, that would be ideal”

— Nutritionist from medium district

Design Highlights

After presenting the key insights to product manager, training managers and the director of product, the design recommendations were also discussed. Based on the findings, I focused on 6 of the following improvements.

Item Units and Measures

This was the most important building block of Item management.

Based on the feedback, I designed this to be very clear the components that were being added within this item. Packaging units and serving unit were seperated for clarity to the user.

Add Item Wizard

I designed a wizard to clearly walk user through through linear steps that are needed in order to successfully add an item and its related attributes.

Restructuring of Secondary Navigation

The pages were restructured and simplified to create a more intuitive user flow and system and the secondary navigation was made horizontal.

Consolidation of Pages

This was done to simplify the process and connect the disconnected pages. 16 pages were consolidated and reorganized to 9 main pages

Restructuring of Secondary Menu

The pages were restructured and simplified to create a more intuitive user flow and system.

Selective Copy Functionality

This functionality allows user to copy specific sections of items that have variations.

Validate and Iterate

After presenting the mockups to same internal subject matter experts, I conducted another round of external user feedback sessions with the same 9 districts to get validation and additional insight there were changes that needed to be made. Based on user and internal feedback, there were changes that needed to be made. For example the examples used for Units of measure weren’t realistic and/or unnecessary. This is an example of the changes that were made.

Some changes that needed to be made:

Unit of measure example
Placement of nutrient sub pages
Some of the verbiage needed to be adjusted.