Mobile Stock Management Workflow

Owned by Nick Reid (Deactivated)
Last updated: Sept 25, 2017
4 min read

Overview

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

Resources:

To Do:

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

Presentation Outline:

The Product Committee meetings 9/27 at 9am PST

We will have 20 minutes to:

  • Introduction and describe Summer of Code
  • Describe what you have done
    • SMS App
    • Cordova
    • Chemist
  • Explain the goal of this mobile prototype
  • Demo the prototype
  • Ask questions to the Product Committee (because if they ask questions, the meeting might never end)
    • How do we show shelf/bin in mobile UI
    • What are the next steps for picking up the design work?

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.

9/24 Nick Reid Edits

9/21 Mary Jo thoughts

  • We don't use grouped products like we have in requisitions
  • Navigation could use accordion/sliding menu all the way until you get to the products
  • For a mobile device, its probably going to be used in a small clinic — 
  • How do you see the summary page so you can check your work before you submit
  • What does an error message look like
    • If you didn't add an adjustment reason to an item – what does that look like
  • Missing Adjustment Reasons feature

PC presentation should include

  • Explain what they did
  • What was your goal
  • What are the next steps for the community picking up this design work

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.

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