PACKING VISUALIZATION
Packing made so easy even a kid can do it
UX researcher
Experience team
UX Lead
My role
Visual designer
Several engineers
Product manager
Background
Packing orders into boxes in the Sam’s Club Fulfillment Centers has largely been a manual process using a very old legacy system. It’s an area with a lot of potential for technological improvements. To increase throughput, Sam’s Club had recently invested in NeoPost’s auto-packing technology. It’s a large machine that custom builds boxes around a set of items. It can construct, seal and label a box within seconds. Because the box wraps securely around the items, no packing filler is needed. Amazing.
NeoPost auto-packing machine
Challenge
Design an experience to help an associate quickly place items onto a loading area in a volume optimized arrangement. In other words…
turn this
into this
Discovery
Before touching a single pixel, we visited a fulfillment center for 2 days to immerse ourselves in the world of a packing associate. We observed the existing process and talked with associates to understand what works and doesn’t work with the existing process. We also got to try out picking and packing orders ourselves.
Packing station at the fulfillment center
Legacy system used for packing
Existing packing flow
Proposed packing flow
Concepts
After our trip, we started to look at examples of spatial design.
We created two main concepts inspired by these examples. We were sure to include important order and items information that associates said they needed to see to complete their tasks.
Side view - this isometric view mimicks the building instructions from Lego or IKEA
Front view - this view was intended to look like the loading area from the packing associate’s point of view
Product images
In our definition of minimum viable product, we used existing product images from the Sam’s Club website. The benefit of this decision was that the project could be built more quickly. The downside is that the images were often distorted since they were stretched out on to the cubes that represent the item volume. Our recommendation was to improve product images in a future release.
Animation
In both concepts, we specified that the items would show from the bottom back right corner to the top front left corner and cycle through until the associate pressed the next order button.
Validation
We tested both views with experienced packers to gain insights. We found that packers found the side view more helpful since it allowed them to see the item shape and overall arrangement better.
Ideally, I would have liked to do a series of timed tests with associates to measure placement speed. However, due to the pandemic our access to fulfillment centers became limited so I decided to test with the next best thing…my kids. If my 8 and 11 year old sons, with zero packing experience, could arrange items in under a minute I felt pretty confident that a seasoned packing associate could do it in a third of the time.
Outcome
Increased boxes packed per hour per person to 443 per hour compared to 34 per hour from manual packing
Reduced packaging void fill by 56% (air bag/ paper fillers in boxes)
$1.17M in annualized operational savings
Guided product managers and engineers new to working with UX through the design process
Got a shout out from Sam’s Club CEO, Kathryn McLay!