Don’t make excuses. Test it.
Primary role: Director Experience Design
Design team: Craig Moore (manager), Sarah Rath (designer), and Antonio Gomes (researcher)
Contribution: Team building, prototype program, general guidance.
It can be hard to test products before launching them. I often hear things like: “We can’t do it without real customer data.” “A prototype will take way too long.” “How can we integrate a design prototype with real hardware?” Excuses are easy, but solutions can always be found… with effort. We were lucky to have Sarah Rath and Antonio Gomes on our team - an ambitious design and research duo - to take this project on. (If you’d like more detail on this project, please visit Sarah’s site).
The Pack Station is for warehouse workers picking and packing items for shipment. Scan an item with an RF gun, assign it to a shipping carton. This simple process includes at least two devices (gun and tablet/computer), and physical and virtual actions (using the gun and navigating through the UI).
The questio was: can we reproduce - to some degree - a scenario that mimics real life? Sarah and Antonio did. While Oracle NetSuite has fully embraced Figma for its collaboration advantages, it is always good to have another tool in your belt. Axure may not be the current design #apptrend, but there is little debate it can produce demonstrably more complex prototypes than Figma or Sketch. So it is not a question of either/or, but more choosing the right app for the job. We had built up Axure expertise on our team and established a training program just for this purpose.
Integrated Testing
Axure has html code that developers can work with, and the team was able to connect the RF gun to the prototype. Antonio and Sarah set up a mock staging area and invited customers to scan items and interact with the prototype.
They took this prototype on a roadshow, going into our customer’s workplaces and having them play with it. This surfaced additional feature ideas like a virtual keyboard and dark mode (when you visit a customer, everyone is reminded of their day to day reality, which could start quite early in the morning, hence the dark mode).
Onsite testing with customers
Brief video walk-through of the pack station for our customers.