Your "one-stop shop" for all things IPR!
The Inventory, Planning, and Replenishment (IPR) department of The Home Depot created a Microsoft SharePoint site to house all systemic and reporting trainings, as well as helpful links to external tools used to manage inventory. The page was updated and iterated upon over the years, but was difficult to navigate and often times was unreliable. I was asked to research and design a new portal site that was easier to use, and make business recommendations of how to continuously improve the site to fit user needs.
My Role
My role: Sole researcher, designer, and editor.
Timeline: May - August 2024
Special thanks to Amrin Hauqe and Kathy Ngu for their assistance in documenting the interview and UAT processes. Additional thanks to Kelly Mattingly for her mentorship and oversight of this project!
Introduction
Problem Statements
IPR analysts lack an efficient way to access quick answers to nuanced business questions, leading to task delays, leadership frustration, and potential business implications.
IPR analysts feel flustered when asked questions they are unsure how to research. The current portal is time-consuming and often does not provide the answers or direction they are looking for.
When IPR analysts see information that was created over a year ago, there is no way for them to gauge the accuracy of that information
How might we...
Put additional features in the portal that could drive more engagement?
Organize the portal differently, so users would not feel the need to bookmark trainings?
Drive understanding that the IPR Portal and the Learning Portal are the same thing?
Key Partnerships
To ensure a broad picture and perspective, I had weekly meetings with the following internal and external partners to provide critical guidance:
IPR Learning Team
VOA (Voice of the Associate) Committee
Inventory Transformation Leadership
Sample groups of IPR Analysts and Managers
EUX Mentorship and Oversight
Personal plug - I will happily take disagreement/input here.
In my personal experience, my previous employers had either a "guide" for on-boarding (previously, I was tasked with writing one myself), or a more tenured associate would show me the lay of the land with no documents on processes or best practices. A part of my user interview script was to pick their brains on other companies who may have a similar database to conduct a competitive analysis, and I came up empty.
To help me understand where things were going wrong in the previous portal, I built out a site map to visualize how complicated navigating the portal had become.
Home Page Call-out's
- The side bar tends to get over-looked.
- The mixture of links to other sections of the portal and links to practical tools/applications is overwhelming.
- The mixture of links to other sections of the portal and links to practical tools/applications is overwhelming.
- Lack of consistency to where the sidebar leads.
- Some links lead to pages with no ability to navigate back to the portal home page. Some lead to external tools/systems. Some are redundant or link to tools that no longer work.
Learning Section Call-out's
- Two ways to navigate to this section of the portal.
- Lack of design consistency in landing page.
- Lack of design consistency within each sub-page.
- Mixture of additional landing pages, webpages, and folders.
- Quick win: A singular page (Tools & Reporting SOPs) contains an additional column displaying how many files are contained within each folder.
- Quick win: A singular page (Tools & Reporting SOPs) contains an additional column displaying how many files are contained within each folder.
- Mixture of additional landing pages, webpages, and folders.
- Two links (IPR Newsletter & Interline/Pro) on main landing page are mis-linked.
Tools/Reporting Section Call-out's
- Two ways to navigate to this section of the portal.
- Questionably outdated.
- Lots of politics and hearsay around Access retirement. Is this ground zero for socializing change management?
- Lots of politics and hearsay around Access retirement. Is this ground zero for socializing change management?
- Not a comprehensive list of tools and reporting resources.
- Lack of design consistency in landing page.
- Lack of consistency of where these links lead. Some lead to the tool itself, while others lead to the expected, still others lead to the learning page.
- Internal pain re: big query, but no training on this.
- Opportunity: Change this page layout to follow Events pages to explain use cases, provide trainings, and provide link to the tool.
- Internal pain re: big query, but no training on this.
Events Section Call-out's
- Two ways to navigate to this section of the portal.
- Lack of design consistency in landing page.
- Both page lay out, and button sizes/design.
- Both page lay out, and button sizes/design.
- Better design consistency within each sub-page.
- Lack of sub-page design consistency.
- A win is within the storytelling of the sub-pages. This ultimately informed how I would design the sub-pages in the new portal.
- Many empty folders within pages.
- Love the webpage feel of these to help the user know if this is the page they need to be on.
User Interviews
Through 15 interviews across the main sectors of IPR (Core, Direct Fulfillment, and Events), I was able to gauge how users interact with the system and understand features they were missing.
Current Usage
Stop, Start, Continue
Stop, Start, Continue
I received a wide range of responses regarding how often folks are using the portal current state. The initial thought was that usage would be linked to seniority or complexity of the business an analyst is responsible for.
Stop, Start, Continue
Stop, Start, Continue
Stop, Start, Continue
Organizing interview feedback into this format helped me to understand what features exist currently that need to be removed or clarified, what is working currently and should remain, and what can be added to drive more engagement.
Low-Fidelity Sketches
Accessibility
Following Home Depot’s design choices from other applications, I ensured that any color contrasting was accessible for all users. While designing icons for the different options in the Portal, I elected to use simple graphics that embody what the user can find within a given section.
- I elected to minimize the amount of text on the page to efficiently direct the user to what they are looking for
User Feedback and Pivots
Navigation
- Users are very happy the simplicity and organization but feel it is not intuitive for users to need to scroll through the whole page.
- Minimized banner size to decrease scrolling needed.
- Icon/Description feedback
- Icons are easy to understand, and design informs what is linked.
- Descriptions should be short and to-the-point. Additional feedback on font size being too small.
- Sidebar Navigation
- Discovered additional drop-down functionality for this within SharePoint, which satisfied an asked for “breadcrumb” navigation.
- Most feedback regarding in-page navigation buttons was neutral.
- Asked to include arrows to draw attention to a “back” action.
Learning Section
- Unified push to combine planned sections within Learning resources:
- Tools, Reporting, & SOPs
- Demand Planning and Inventory Management
- Remove Events & Resets
- Push to keep all resources around these subjects in their own page away from Core/DF.
- Rename “Daily Operations”
- Analysts understood this to mean IPR-specific tasks.
- Re-titled “Non-IPR Learning.”
- Users did not feel scrolling was intuitive
- With the condensing of buckets, I was able to make the sub-page a one-pager.
Reporting and Tools/Systems
- Removed frequently used reporting.
- Originally, I thought it would be valuable to include a list of the most frequently used reports within the reporting suite with an explanation of what that report could be used for. Users felt this muddied up the page and ultimately would rather than information live in the reporting suite.
- Ultimately this will be a separate UX project to re-imaging the Reporting Suite.
- Add in a “general” section, then break out into links that are function-specific.
- i.e. – all teams use the IPR Reporting Suite, there is no need to redundantly link that page.
Templates and Queries & Development
- Users were delighted to have quick access to these pages.
- Comedically, these page exists in the current portal, but is buried. I have not encountered an analyst who knows where to find these current-state, making this seem like a net new page.
- Additional partnership with leadership and HR to ensure all development resources are centrally located.