Mobile Stock Management Workflow

Overview

Nikita and Protichi are proposing designs for modifying our stock management workflow to work on a cell phone.

Resources:

Balsamiq Mock-ups
Mock Ups (some mobile and some web applications - scroll to the bottom)
[mFlow/HCMIS] mFlow VRF Processing / Issue (District to Facility) (more on mFlow)

To Do:

Demo data (20 items)
More depth in problem statement and user stories

Problem Statement

Stock clerks have the difficult task of tracking the inventory at a clinic. These clinics can range in size from a district hospital to a rural health outpost.

We have chosen to focus primarily on doing a physical inventory in the OpenLMIS system, and using that to refine the OpenLMIS-UI design to support mobile navigation and data entry.

9/17 Draft Feedback

The following feedback is from Nick Reid (Deactivated) and Alfred Mchau

Workflow Feedback

Home page

I like the ideas that you included for the homepage – general web designer trick is to make the home page last, since they are usually political and hard

We like the navigation paradigm

Leaving space for help and instructional text is useful. Alfred Mchau mentioned that some administrators will infrequently use the program, so leaving hints is great.
- If you have trouble writing "help" copy - either write something very simple (which can say nothing "Physical Inventory is where you will do physical inventory tasks" (see how the sentence is pointless and self referential)) OR copy some text from a book (I use alice in wonderland) – NEVER USE LOREM IPSUM

Physical Inventory

Missing from physical inventory 'index' page
- Name of facility
- If a specific physical inventory has an active draft
Need middle screen to show full list of products in physical inventory
- Alfred pointed out that a stock room is not organized in alphabetical order, so being able to find a single product from a list of 300+ items is important. Include the free text search here
- Alfred suggested that products with multiple lots (vaccines) be grouped together, and a user should have a similar "sub" workflow here – as they will want to add a new lot that was not recorded earlier.
When editing a single product at a time on a mobile device, we thought using buttons like "update" or "next" would make the user feel more secure that they actually changed an element. Technically, all the changes are being saved, and on a larger screen size it feels normal to skip between rows because you can see them.
An insane design requirement is that for a larger hospital, multiple people work on the same physical inventory at the same time. Doing some design work to understand how this might work would be valuable to OpenLMIS – even though technically there are big hurdles, but getting the right design without focusing on technology is important.
IMPORTANT NOTE: When doing a physical inventory, a user will be picking up and putting down their phone often. This means that lots of state should be visible so a user doesn't get lost. The most important aspect is if the user is done recording information and is ready for the next step.

Design Feedback

This is more technical feedback about how to make a design, and is not relevant to feature development

Highlights:

Focus on the text on the screen, and remove any unrelated text. Keep it simple and try to be realistic – it helps keep feedback focused on the design
Align items ctrl+left/right arrow does a 'large' space in most design programs, its helpful for making accurate spacing quick (another trick is to adjust the sizes and positions using numerical input)
Try to avoid colors other than white, light gray, and black text. Simple pallets keep feedback focused. We do use light blue and dark red as accents.