Employer
Art.com
Role
UX/UI Design, Art Direction, Front-End/Back-End Dev
Year
2012
User Research
My first step in evaluating the scope of this project was to interview the employees who were doing the quality audits and observing what their day-to-day routine consisted of. The auditors conducted their product quality audits on paper forms. The next step was to enter the scores into an Excel spreadsheet at the end of their shift each day. It was clear that this was a highly inefficient way to perform the auditing process for two reasons. The first, being productivity. A quality auditor would need to cut their auditing time short at the end of every shift in order to reserve time to enter the data into their Excel spreadsheet. The second problem was the tediousness of compiling all of the data in order to create actionable items for the management team. The effect of that was that production flaws were slower to be identified. I also took time to interview members of the management team as they were the ones that were overseeing daily production. They were able to offer me insight on what kinds of metrics they would like to see reported on and in what frequency.
Define
Information Architecture
After determining the needs of the auditing staff and the production managers, I had a clear vision of how to proceed. My next step in the process was to layout the information architecture of the application. This part of the process also helped me to start building out the table structure in the database and to understand what data I would need to be tracking.
User Flow
Understanding the flow of information for both the QA staff and the management team, allowed me to move onto the next step of creating wireframe mockups of the application.
Ideate
Wireframes were developed and then presented to stakeholders and end-users to gather feedback. This was helpful because the staff who would be doing the audits helped me to confirm the best user flow for the application. The management team offered their feedback on all of the data being captured and how they would like to see the data reported.
Validate
User Testing/Affinity Mapping
Once I had a functional prototype, I was able to conduct user testing. My testing script was aligned to the use cases that I had defined. I was able to spend a significant amount of time with all of the qa auditors to gather their feedback and to identify opportunities within the user flow.
User Interface
OD3 Onboarding Mockups
Page gives options to create a new account, or if user is going to audit a fitting line then they can enter in the line number before starting work.
Dashboard for primary metrics being tracked by Operations Division.
Dashboard for monitoring first pass yield of both Manufacturing and Fulfillment cells.
Summary page indicating the first pass yield and history of logged defects for current shift.
Page QA Auditor arrives on when logging in. Here they can initiate an audit form to being working, review what cells they have audited, or communicate with QA Lead through messaging system.
Page presented to QA shift lead when they login. Here they can review productivity of auditors on shift, view communications from auditors, and creating custom audit questions for audit form. This role also has full access to generate productivity reports for any cell in the facility and its corresponding first pass yield.
This page is essentially the backbone of the entire QA Web App. All datapoints are captured in this form. The questions are populated dynamically populated based on the cell selection of the auditor. Some questions, when an affirmative response is given, present with a secondary question for clarification.
Tool for users to search for audit data by date.
Page to view all individual audits and make edits to captured data if need be.
Vendor Scorecard
After our VP or Quality was brought in, one of her initiatives was to focus on the vendors providing our materials to us. She wanted to monitor the quality of prints, moulding, mats, and other manufacturing materials to identify areas of opportunity. She needed a system to handle the data collection and communication with vendors. I spent a few months determining what data she wanted tracked, what triggers needed to be designed to interact with the data that was being collected, and finally, designing an interface that effectively served her needs. I was able to design and build a component to the QA Application that centered around vendor quality performance. The VP of Quality was now able to have tangible evidence to take to vendors to negotiate refunds, amend return policies, and identify vendor relationships that needed to be severed altogether.
Acrylic Utilization
One of the biggest cost-saving opportunities for the Operations Division was the efficient use of consumable materials. The acrylic used for the framed posters and art prints being produced comes in large 4' x 8' sheets and then cut down based on whatever orders are being filled. The objective is to utilize as much of each sheet as possible and reduce the accumulation of unused scrap. To support the Production Team's efforts to increase acrylic utilization, I created a way for the production leads to count their acrylic stock each day. Then, the Ops Management team could closely track the utilization performance and adjust manufacturing practices accordingly. Over the course of two years, acrylic utilization went from ~55% to over 75%. This initiative resulted in a significant cost savings for the Operations Division and created practices that are still followed to this day.
Digital Displays
In both the Ohio and Netherlands production facilities, a number of flat-screen digital displays were mounted throughout the buildings to provide information to employees while on the floor. One key use of these displays was in the production department. Each production "cell" had it's own display where employees could see real-time updates of any defects being logged in their area. This aspect of the QA Application enabled production leads to identify problems as they were happening and respond immediately to provide a resolution. Below is an example of one such display. When a QA Auditor flags a defect when they are reviewing assembled products, a "dot" appears on the area of the given production cell. The screen refreshes every 30 seconds so the data being shown is always current. When a given area exceeds their defect threshold, a green box will turn red and the lead of the cell along with the QA Manager are notified of the situation.
Conclusion
In many ways, the launch of my application was a success for the company and particularly the Operations Division. Operations management now had a real-time tool they could use to track “First Pass Yield”, which is a primary indicator of the overall quality output of the facility. As the number of audits being done per day dramatically increased, so did the performance of the production staff. The reason being that quality issues were able to be identified much earlier allowing management to make necessary adjustments where needed. This also led to an increase in the company’s NPS score. NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a metric used by many companies to measure the satisfaction of their customers. As the quality scores went up, so did the NPS. The success of my application in the Ohio facility led to it being launched at the company’s production facility in the Netherlands as well.
- NPS - Saw a 3 point increase year over year.
- FPY - First Pass Yield when from an average score of 89-90% to 98–99%.
- RETURNS - Reduction of order returns was observed over the first year of the platform’s usage.
- WASTE COST - Increased utilization of some consumable materials through Merchandising product development resulted in a reduction of waste cost. Over the course of two years, acrylic utilization went from ~55% to over 75%.
- IMPROVED EFFICIENCY - Prior to launch of platform, auditors were performing around 50 audits per day. After the platform was launched, they could average over 120 audits per day.
