This problem statement was given to us in a design hackathon conducted in VIT Vellore. The time given was 5 days and the team consisted of myself and Nishant Pant
The Problem Statement
Design a product experience that would help pharmacists keep track of their inventory. Design the experience from the perspective of the pharmacist who wants to keep an easy check of the medicine inventory and also wants to speed up the process of managing it. Identify the pain points in the inventory management project and solve these pain points.
🎯Goals
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Find user behavior and user pain points using various UX methodologies.
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Finding the MVP features of the website.
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Solve the problem with the Hi-Fi prototype.
Research
📚 Secondary research
I started off by googling what exactly goes around with the inventory management of a medical store by reading blogs, articles, and research papers to validate our initial assumptions.
If you count all your assets you always show a profit — Wilson Mizner
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Inventory management is defined as the continuing process of planning, organizing, and controlling inventory that aims at minimizing the investment in inventory while balancing supply and demand.
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There are three methods used in pharmacy to manage inventory: the visual method, the periodic method, and the perpetual method. Of which the perpetual inventory management method is the most common and efficient method to manage pharmacy inventory. It involves a computerized system that monitors the inventory at all times on a continuous systematic basis.
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In this system, the inventory is manually entered into the computer software, and the appropriate amount of products is automatically reduced from the inventory when a prescription or medication order is filled.
🔍 Primary research
We could interview only 3 pharmacists over a call because of the pandemic situation, over the interview we asked them about their daily tasks and inventory management.
The interview helped us understand the user's needs and pain points even better.
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A few still use old-school pen-paper techniques to manage their inventory but most of them shifted to a digital platform.
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The pharmacists experienced trouble manually entering the medicines sold onto their computers in order to manage the inventory.
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Pharmacists experience trouble when medicine goes out of stock and causes discomfort to the customer.
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The pharmacists experience trouble while keeping track of the ordered inventory and while making the monthly/annual sales report.
This helped us create the User Persona and also list down the points for the Minimum Viable Product.
Define
👤User Persona
🔗 The Final Connections
Ideate
🦄 MVP features
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Easy track of inventory with less work for pharmacists.
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Reminders to stock up before the medicine go out of stock.
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Easy access to delivery partners and vendors.
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Visual representation of invoices and sales.
With all the insights we gathered from the research, we established a process for implementing it into a hi-fi prototype. The first thing we did was use these insights and create an Information Architecture and User Flow for the entire website.
This gave us clarity on how to group certain features of the product and also establish a smooth experience for the pharmacists.
Design
🎞 Wireframes
Once the user flow and IA were done, with the help of that we moved to Wireframing. We used Figma to make low-fidelity wireframes. This was a time-consuming process as it required constant changes according to the feedback we kept getting from our mentors.
😍 Visual Design
Now that we were satisfied with our wireframes we moved on to making the UIs in Figma. We first came up with a design system, where we made a color palette that fits the product and decided to work with DM sans as the font.
Authentication pages
The signup and login pages were kept very simple and only the necessary information from the pharmacists was collected. We gave an option to either log in through email or through a google account.
We also made a forgot password page so that recovering the account remains easy for the users.
Dashboard
Gives a quick insight into a number of out-of-stock products, low-stock products, on route deliveries. Also gives a graphical representation of the stock.
Easy navbar for Quick access to other pages and quick add product/bill/vendor option.
Products
The pharmacist gets an option to add medicines to his inventory either by adding it manually like the conventional approach or scan the medicine’s barcode from the box.
To add the products by scanning, pharmacists can scan the barcode of the medicine box with the help of the partner app that allows them to scan, then the user has to enter the low stock warning number and then it shows a success prompt once the product is added to the inventory.
The landing page here has all the products that are available in the inventory listed here, specific medicine can be easily searched using the search box or sorting according to need.
Billing
This page here gives a quick insight into the sales and profits. It also shows the recent products sold.
The bill is important to log every transaction, but here it also helps us manage the inventory.
Whenever a bill is added the number of products sold will be reduced from the database, hence managing the inventory without having to manually reduce the numbers.
Vendors
The pharmacists have a hard time contacting and remembering the vendors, they mostly use their phones for this but it would help them keep if all their vendors’ contact info is available in one place!
New vendors can be manually added.
Deliveries
Pharmacists usually track their deliveries through their delivery partners' websites, but after establishing the integration they can track their orders from the website itself.
The pharmacists will have to give the necessary info that can help us get the delivery data from the respective delivery website and display it on our website.
Notifications
The pharmacists get a reminder as a notification whenever a certain medicine is low in stock or out of stock or is arriving soon so that the pharmacists can act accordingly and manage the inventory efficiently.
Profile
The user can edit their personal info and choose to use their own display picture here by removing the default photo.
The user can also log out from the platform from here.
FAQs
The platform for a newcomer can be problematic, so we made a FAQ page where the platform’s functionalities can be explained.
🌈 Prototype
All the UI screens are prototyped using interactive components and dissolve properties in Figma.