Design Process

01. DISCOVERY PHASE

THE USERS

Hospital Inventory Managers are the primary users of this feature. They are in charge of buying, maintaining, and managing the allocation of physical assets throughout a hospital.

Inventory Managers have the constant challenge of managing the hospital equipment under their watch and minimizing equipment theft, loss, and damage. These managers are responsible for maintaining and tracking massive amounts of equipment and most are open to new processes and technology that can help them.

This feature is important for hospital Inventory Managers because it enables them to define which information needs to be recorded each time an asset is added to Where. These information fields are a primary way assets are identified and searched in the system and are critical for Inventory Managers to be able to search and keep track of hospital inventory.

I did an audit of how this feature interfaces with the overall application to understand its scope.

The asset information fields created in this feature define:

• what asset information users see in an asset’s detail panel

• information fields users complete when they add a new tag

02. DEFINE PHASE

The Problem

Inventory Managers are under a lot of pressure to know their inventory status at all times so they can ensure there is enough available equipment to meet hospital needs. They need to be able to define what types of information they can track their inventory with so it’s easier for them to search and find their inventory in the Where application.

Design Goal

Make it easy for Inventory Managers to define the custom information fields they need to track and manage hospital assets in Where. Iterate on the previous designers work and validate the designs with engineering and product management to ensure the feature is ready for engineering handoff.

After surveying the original designs and meeting with product management and engineering teams I was able to define what was missing in the current designs and what sections may need more design iteration prior to engineering handoff.

Current design (below)

03. DESIGN, VALIDATE, ITERATION PHASE

Round 01 designs

I added the ability for users to make fields required or optional since I hypothesized this is a product requirement and was able to validate it with product management. I also added the ability for users to change field order since I learned their order in this feature is maintained wherever these information fields occur in the app.

Why custom field order and the ability to make a custom field optional or required is important

• The asset detail panel shows all the information available for an asset tag, the custom field information inside it displays information specific to the asset not the tag hardware attached to it.

• The ability to make a custom field required will ensure that all the asset tags in a system have the same field of information.

The custom field and moving components so far seem too cumbersome and tedious to use. I made the mistake of trying to design this feature from my database of experience and realized I am actually just trying to build a form building user interface. I have no experience designing form builders so I decided to pause the design exploration and research design pattern conventions for form builders.

I cherry picked the best parts of the form builders I saw in Google Forms and Type Form and incorporated them into our feature.

• I decided to expand on the current design and make the form building component of the feature operate more like a typical form building UI that users may have seen if they ever used Google Forms, Survey Monkey, and Typeform.

• My goal was to make this feature as easy to use as possible since I hypothesize that inventory managers do not create surveys and forms regularly.

Round 02 Designs

I decided to expand on the current design and make the form building component of the feature operate more like a typical form building UI that users may have seen if they ever used Google Forms, Survey Monkey, and Typeform.

1. My goal was to make this feature as easy to use as possible since I hypothesize that inventory managers do not create surveys and forms regularly.

2. Users can now hover over a custom field component and drag the component to change the order

3. Added a “Preview Template” option so users can see what their custom field order will look like in the add tag form and the tag detail panel

04. RESULTS & IMPLEMENTATION PHASE

Final Designs & Engineering Handoff

I created redline documents for engineers to reference and spent time sitting next to engineers as needed when they were developing this feature.

Changes from Round 02 designs

• I changed the form factor of the custom field components in the final designs because the custom fields may not always display as two columns throughout the application in the future.

• I simplified the preview screen for the final design because the preview screens I developed in Round 03 were too complicated to implement for this MVP release and the preview templates would have to be swapped out if the designs ever changed.

• I created redline documents for engineers to reference and spent time sitting next to engineers as needed when they were developing this feature.

Outcomes

• Successful launch of a custom field building feature that allows Inventory Managers to define what information must be entered every time an asset tag is added to Where so that it can be properly identified and tracked once it’s added.

• More powerful asset tag search capabilities since users can now search by the information in the custom tag fields.

• Asset detail panels now contain information that is specific to the assets attached to the hardware tags and not just details about the tags.

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