Early UX in Hardware & Software

Role

Lead UX representative for the decant and mobile workflow

Worked with

UX lead, UX manager, UX researcher, product managers and the warehouse management team

Duration

3 months

The context

A new business model needed a new workflow. Nobody had fully mapped what that meant physically.

Traditionally, suppliers shipped directly to each individual warehouse site. The new model changed that: everything goes to one large parent site first, then distributes internally to smaller child sites, bringing significant cost savings on supplier logistics.

It ran as a proof of concept, with the goal of proving the model worked well enough to sell as a service that could save clients millions. The workflow meant adapting existing mobile apps and dashboards to a completely new physical and logistical process: real workers, real pallets, real constraints that nobody had fully mapped yet.

I was brought in before any engineering work had started. That timing made all the difference.

Because UX was involved early enough, we uncovered issues nobody knew about until we went to the site.

The UX team mapped out the full journey together before heading out. I owned the inbound mobile and station flow, roughly half the overall workflow, while the other UX designer owned the inbound dashboard flow. We brought paper prototypes, software prototypes, and a plan to capture both timing data and qualitative feedback.

We contacted the site ahead of time to get pallet truck drivers, area managers, and whoever would run this workflow every day involved in the flow testing. They physically moved pallets, followed the proposed flow, and told us what worked and what didn't.

The trials revealed issues we couldn't have found in any design review or stakeholder workshop

Expensive surprises before deployment beat expensive surprises after it. The product manager took the findings and worked through the implications: communicating pallet standards to suppliers, planning holding area layout, calculating pallet moving time to assess cost and feasibility. The MVP scope expanded as a result — deliberately, rather than as a surprise mid-development.

The workers who participated responded positively to being involved. Contributing to a workflow that would shape their daily work doubled as informal onboarding, giving them early familiarity before deployment.

The live site testing wasn't just research. It was relationship building and change management at the same time.

In the first project, early UX involvement shaped a software workflow before it was built. In the second, the design challenge wasn't digital: it was physical. Instead of apps and dashboards — a warehouse station workers stand at, reach into, and interact with dozens of times per shift. Instead of software engineers — hardware engineers and an ergonomics specialist. Instead of screen prototypes — tables, totes, and products from the warehouse floor.

The approach was identical: get the right people in the room before decisions are locked.

Role

Co-lead UX

Worked with

UX researcher — co-planned and co-hosted the workshop

Workshop participants

Hardware engineers, software engineers, hardware engineering manager, principal product manager, product managers, staff engineers, and health & safety analyst

Duration

Full-day workshop, followed by additional follow-up work

The context

One physical station, three workflows.

Warehouse stations currently handle one workflow each — decant, pick, or inventory management — each with its own hardware setup. The company was exploring a next-generation station combining all three in a single unit, which meant rethinking the software and the physical hardware: the station's shape, its ergonomics, and how conveyors would reconfigure for different tasks.

This was early-stage exploration, with no right answer to hand over. The goal was to open up the possibility space before individual teams made siloed decisions. I co-led the workshop with a UX researcher; in the room were hardware engineers, product managers, and a principal analyst specialising in ergonomics.

From video analysis to a life-size prototype, in a single day.

Tote angle and height: a daily physical strain that only became visible when someone actually stood there.

When people physically reached into totes at different angles and heights, the geometry mattered enormously. Wrong angle or too high, and reaching the bottom was difficult, sometimes impossible for shorter workers. Not a minor usability issue: a daily physical strain for every worker, every shift.

The team explored height and angle combinations on the life-size prototype, adjusting and testing repeatedly, while the ergonomics specialist assessed reach, posture, and physical load against professional standards in real time.

By the end of the day, the engineering team had

• A clear picture of the core physical actions the station needed to support per workflow
• Awareness of ergonomic constraints — tote angle, height, reach — they hadn't considered closely before
• An understanding of how conveyor design would need to change across workflows
• Direction for the hardware design grounded in physical testing rather than assumption

The workshop gave them something a design brief could not: the experience of actually trying to use the thing they were designing.

The product and engineering teams took the workshop's findings straight into the next-generation station design. Development started shortly after the workshop and was still ongoing when I left the company.