Pickup Coordination at Meerby
I led the design of Expedite, a mobile tool coordinating in-store pickups across sales floor, warehouse, cash, and loading teams. As the sole designer, I mapped the operation, designed workflows for each role, and tested them with Canadian Tire employees. The product shipped across multiple retailers before eventually becoming part of Meerby.
Timeline
May 2022 to December 2022
Team
Problem Framing
Selling big-ticket products required an entire store
Buying something big, like a treadmill, looks simple to the customer. It actually takes several employees working across different parts of the store to fulfill an order. A sales-floor employee starts the request. Warehouse employees find and prep the item. Cash handles payment, and loading employees finish the handoff. Information has to move with the order as it changes hands. The challenge was to turn a physical, multi-person process into a single connected workflow.
Research Synthesis
Turning employee research into workflows
I interviewed employees and managers across different roles to understand how big-ticket orders moved through the store. This included creating a request, finding the product, handling payment, and loading it into a customer's vehicle. I organized what I learned through affinity mapping and user scenarios.
Store Operations
How big-ticket orders were handled across the store.
Employee Roles
How responsibilities differ between employee roles.
Employee Handoffs
How an order moves from one part of the store to another.
Information
What info do employees need at different stages
Systems Thinking
Mapping one customer experience across multiple employee workflows
Before designing the interface, I mapped the customer journey alongside the internal workflow to understand how a single order moved through the store. The process crossed several roles. Breaking the workflows into employee scenarios helped me understand where responsibilities began, overlapped, and handed off. Those relationships became the structure of the product.
Information Architecture
Structuring the product around employee responsibilities
No single employee owned all of the workflow, and each needed different information to do their jobs. I structured the application around those responsibilities. Most areas stayed accessible across roles, since employees often took on different responsibilities across shifts. Management was the exception, because it held private information. Separating the roles allowed for flexibility while also protecting private information.
User Testing
Testing the user experience with employees
I started my ideas in mid-fidelity screens so I could evaluate the workflows independently from the finished interface. I tested prototypes with employees across different roles.
Getting time during active retail shifts was difficult, so we used focused task-based sessions of roughly ten minutes. I observed employees completing tasks from their part of the process and asked them to talk through what they expected at each step.
Mid Fidelity
High Fidelity
Prototyping & User Testing
Interaction Design
Designing four workflows that had to stay connected
Each employee process affected what happened next. I designed four distinct workflows around each role's responsibilities while making sure the order, its context, and its status moved cleanly between them from the initial customer request through to pickup.
Expedite
Turning a customer conversation into an actionable request
Customer-facing employees needed to create a request without stepping away from the customer they were helping. I designed the workflow to capture only the information needed to move the order forward, turning an in-person conversation into a clear task for the next employee.
Pick
Turning a request into warehouse action
Once submitted, the request entered the warehouse workflow. Logistics employees could see waiting requests, claim work, locate the correct product, and move it to the appropriate pickup location. The experience had to make the next action clear while keeping the order's status visible to everyone involved.
Pay
Keeping orders moving even when there are problems
Not every order moved cleanly from request to pickup. Price adjustments, rainchecks, unavailable products, and other exceptions could interrupt the flow. I designed these states so employees could resolve the immediate issue without losing the order's history, context, or place in the larger workflow.
Load
Completing the final handoff
When the customer arrived, the workflow shifted from preparing the order to completing the pickup. Employees needed to identify the correct request, confirm the item was ready, coordinate loading, and close the order. I designed the final stage to preserve continuity from the original request through to the last physical handoff.
Impact
Expedite shipped in December 2022 and ran in Canadian Tire, Tim Hortons and Home Hardware stores. It solved a real operational problem, but its value was harder to communicate as a standalone product. Expedite's functionality was folded into Meerby as part of one platform.
Reflections
That outcome taught me the difference between solving a user problem and building a successful product. Expedite was also the first time I owned a product with this many interconnected roles and handoffs. I learned to start thinking about experience in terms the people and dependencies.