BULK INTERACTION PATTERN (WALMART)

Q2 2022

Walmart is the world’s largest company by revenue with about $570B in annual revenue. It is also the largest employer in the world with 2.2M employees. One of the company’s initiative is to build an omni tool for Merchants to evaluate & manage their inventory items, formulate business strategies then execute or launch these items.

It is clear users need a way to interact with these items not just individually but also in bulk.

Process

Discovering and understanding the need

To augment our user understanding and track design value adds, the design team documents the user journey. With the design framework of the tool fairly stable, my attention turned to Bulk Interactions - what is the user experience for applying input in bulk. The item inventory is displayed on an interactive data table. Our research findings and user journey map indicates that users need the ability to apply actions to multiple items at a time.

Design interaction concepts

I developed 2 concepts. Both seemed equally good solutions. Internal feedback and reactions when socializing the concepts reflected the same. Our researcher recommended to test them to determine the direction.

Bulk interaction concepts

Testing results

Our researcher moderated an A/B testing session with prototype of the concepts. We were surprise with the results, it was split 50-50. Half the users favored one and the others favored the other.

Tiebreaker

To break the tie and arrive at a final design, designers ran the concepts through heuristic evaluations and submitted it for PURE (Practical Usability Rating by Experts) testing. Only after viewing the concepts with unbiased lens, the final direction became apparent. The decision boiled down to the concept that provided a clear Call to Action or obvious ‘next step’ for the user. For this reason, concept 1 provided a better user experience overall.



  • Lessons

    It is important to seek unbiased results in usability testing. Sometimes we’re inherently blinded by virtue of being too close to the designs. In this case, unbiased outside evaluators pointed out usability issues in the concepts and help determine the final direction.