Print Fulfillment Web App

This white label SaaS was created for printing and  fulfillment. The platform was affectionately called “PSP” or Print Service Provider and managed multiple third-party accounts and their many product lines over 2 facilities. During my three year tenure, the software matured into an efficient, high-performing platform that shipped over 2 million orders per year.

As the only product designer on the engineering team, I took ownership of the entire design process from ideation to validation, I drove initiatives working closely with my cross-functional partners, served as the Agile Product Owner for the platform's engineering team, managed QA testing, and validated using multiple strategies.

From Greenfield to Platform

I partnered heavily with the lead engineer in the original greenfield planning of the software which included role-based permissions, white labeling capabilities, multiple facilities locations with print.

First Version

The lead engineer and I were on an extremely tight timeline to get the new system up and running. The stakeholders wanted us to move forward without much information gathering. So we took our best guess at what we thought the warehouse workers would want. We got it right in significant ways and wrong in other ways.

Early whiteboard of main pages of application

First version of the app UI

Second Version

We received our first real feedback from the managers on the app’s performance with their teams. It got the job done but it could improve. I went to the warehouse and worked alongside the workers. Observing them and interviewing them and I identified some areas to improve.

Whiteboarding of the permissions views by role.

Second version of the app UI with tooltips and more contrast.

Third Version

After the first year, the engineering team changed. I was now working with a different, dedicated group of engineers and the software was very stable. So I turned my efforts to improving the processes and developing the software out to a full service product that was ready for licensing. See Other Initiatives section below for some of these efforts.

v3 dashboard with reporting

v3 scanning page with section color coding

Challenges and Outcomes

Timelines were really our biggest obstacle. In the beginning the upper management only really thought about this platform in the last half of the year when the third-party retail clients would ramp up for the holidays. This meant that all of the improvements would be rushed to release. 

After working with the upper management I was able to change how they thought about the platform and by the end of my tenure the roadmap spanned the entire year with a comfortable pace of releases. 


Learnings

Guessing only gets you so far

Because of the timeline, we had to make many assumptions on the user needs for the first version. Only after its release did we start to get real information. And then we realized that we were off a bit in these areas:

  • The software was used on very large screens instead of tables and laptops.

  • The lighting in the warehouse made it difficult to see so the color pallet needed more contrast and variation.

  • We assumed that since the warehouse staff mostly spoke English as a second language that they would like big buttons that contextually ran across the top bar, but they didn't so we adjusted to a left navigation.

Involved can equal engaged

After this experience we changed the methodology to include surveys and interviews of the warehouse workers before any major changes and encouraged them to live test the updates on our staging server or in planned sessions. This helped to keep the fulfillment process going with minimal down times and kept the warehouse workers engaged. After this they started telling us when the got an idea for improvements. Most of their ideas turned into improvements. 

Other Initiatives

Over the next 2 years I partnered heavily with the COO, the two Facilities Managers, and Head of Customer Service for over 40 product initiatives that advanced the platform forward.

Allocation of Orders

When I joined the team the company only had one facility but quickly grew and opened another one on the other side of the country. To solve the immediate need, I worked with the engineers to give me a way to manually move orders in the console while the interface was being built. This shortcut evolved into several bulk moving tools and laid the foundation for several interface status reports that helped the warehouse team leads manage their teams. 

Outcome

Engineers are clever in finding the shortest path to solve a problem and sometimes those shortcuts and yield big results.

Bulk tool

Status report

Allocation tool for Amins to create new rules for order flow

Easy On/Off for product lines to a facility

Improve QA Process

A big challenge for one of our third party accounts was to match the correct die cut shape of the card to the set of printed envelopes. I created a drawing of each shape and added the shape icons to the print slips that went with each order, added them to the order details pages, added them to the QA final shipping screen and made cheatsheets with all of the shapes to be posted at the stations in the warehouses.

Outcome

These measures together helped the veteran staff and the holiday help improve their accuracy rates by more than 15% for both facilities.

A print slip with shape icon Petal

Final shipping QA screen with shapes

Shape (deckle) added order detail screen

Shapes Cheatsheet that was posted on warehouse stations

Reduce Short Shipped Orders

Another fulfillment challenge was shipping the orders with less quantity than needed or “shipping short”. The Facilities manager and I collaborated on creating a “binning” system that would work for our order types and our app. We created physical shelving with numbered “bins” at each station and corresponding digital bins in the app to keep track of them. 

Outcome

These measures reduced short orders by about 20%. 

Flow of order move through the system.

Digital bins.

Order detail with BIN number displayed in orange.

Paper Reductions

A third party product line included for shipping one printed sheet for a print slip and one for an invoice. I worked with the CEO on combining these sheets into one that was printed when the piece was printed. 

Outcome

Printing this way reduced the paper and ink charges for that entire line by about 33%.