PIT Inspection

Deloitte, Kroger (Client)

Expertise: Mobile UX Design | Discovery Sessions | Retail

The PIT Inspection tool is part of the Kroger's Compliance suite of applications that allowed store associates to inspect Powered Industrial Trucks (PIT) by scanning each vehicle and recording their responses on the app to meet the store and OSHA safety guidelines.

Team:

1 UX Designer (me)

1 Project Manager

1 Content Strategist

2 Engineers

1 Product Manager

2 Business Owners

MY ROLE

My role was a product designer responsible for discovery, user research, design, prototyping, and testing. 

THE CHALLENGE

The challenge was how to get users to adopt a digital process for inspection of PIT vehicles and sending results back to store leadership to fix the vehicles, if necessary, and communicate to associates. We were converting from the FR handheld device to a Zebra device for performing the inspections.

Approach

My approach was to create an engaging experience for stakeholders to provide insights and develop personas in the discovery phase. These are the steps we followed to gather insights, develop personas, map the current user journey and develop use cases for the wireframes. By following this approach, we were able to uncover insights regarding the problem at hand. It also helped in designing a better user flow for conducting PIT inspections and identifying interactions between associate facing and backend systems.

USABILITY TESTING

We conducted a usability study on the prototype to understand user engagement.

Here are the main takeaways:

  • Associates like the ability to input details about a failed inspection so it's more clear as to what was the issue

  • Associates expected that they can easily inspect a PIT vehicle across many components in a single hub

  • The ability to view tutorials to an inspection component was especially liked by associates

  • Associates expected a seamless notification process to store leadership about failed inspections and to other associates to prevent them from using a vehicle that failed inspection

FINAL DESIGNS

The findings from the usability study informed the designs.

REFLECTIONS

The visioning workshops helped a great deal to get a better sense of the challenges and people’s understanding of the functionality of this tool. During the user journeys, one of the things I discovered were opportunities in notifications between associate, store management and technician. There were two separate systems maintaining the inspections and submitting a service ticket for a failed inspection. Kroger was moving to a new system called Maximo that was more robust than the previous system.

There were other products in the roadmap that could follow a similar flow like PIT vehicles. For example, bakery ovens, balers, conbi ovens, deli and cheese slicers and meat grinders. PIT inspection designs proved to be successful and Kroger ordered further projects around equipment inspection that would follow a similar flow to PIT equipment. We were able to successfully win those contracts with Kroger to start designing the experience for the other equipments.