Campbell’s STAR: Route ManagementDistributors can order items for their physical inventory, view item descriptions, manage their virtual inventory, and service stores along their route.
Discovery Validation, Product Design, UX, UI, iOS, AndroidValidation and distillation
As product owners, team leads, and client stakeholders complete initial feature validation, the Route Management team simultaneously kicks off execution. My role is to begin each UX phase with discovery validation.
Assumptions, acceptance criteria, “nice to haves”
User personas
Campbell’s Snacks independent distributor roles vary from a single person business, to distribution business owners with subordinates who have their own route. There are 2-3 personas that need to be accounted for, depending on the feature. For example:
Single Truck and SBU (strategic business unit) Distributors need to experience promotional features, and understand the wholesale cost impact at a single store when servicing their route.
Independent Distributor Payers need to be able to view their subordinates’ service ticket transactions after applying those promotions, and see how that impacts the Payer’s in-storage inventory.
Technical requirements and flow
Low-fidelity mockups and user flows help visualize what is desired, identify current technical dependencies due to feature iteration and/or user persona roles and permissions, and explore all possible solutions — ranging from the most viable product (MVP) to what is beyond the initial scope. This keeps the sprint goals on track while also allowing the team to dream big and find new ways to push the product towards what “could be”.
Exploration
Once design has a good understanding of the feature definition, goals, user personas and flows, acceptance criteria, and scope, extensive UX/UI exploration leads to technical validation — including interactivity, functionality, and API requirements.
Feature:Route Order Form
Initial exploration and design efforts attempted to align this feature more closely with current online ordering processes, but it was becoming apparent that we needed to zoom out and challenge some of the established process assumptions that came out of discovery.
Swiping cards, dynamic week and day controls, and an interactive summary drawer gave distributors (who are working on the go in their trucks, warehouse, stores) a large workspace that accounts for data input and table interactivity.
Feature:Load Orders
Distributors can view a list of order deliveries of products that they ordered through the Route Order Form and are scheduled to be delivered to the distributor’s storage facility. Those order deliveries can be loaded into the user’s virtual inventory, delivery issues can be resolved, and quantities and values are automatically translated accordingly to the user’s distributor business needs and Campbell’s data model.
Feature:Inventory management
When viewing their virtual inventory, distributors can manage and reconcile their inventory. These are key features in STAR. Product is constantly moving in and out of their inventory, and distributors need the ability to invoice their customers and receive new deliveries, and their virtual inventory in STAR must accurately reflect their physical inventory in real-time.
