The inventory management is a self-service tool for Marqeta customers to track real-time inventory data and re-order inventory when the level is low to reduce the risk of running out of cards.
Marqeta is a card payment company. They issue payment cards like credit and debit in different forms, physical, virtual, digital wallet, etc., and also process payments from the time the card is swiped to when the transaction is settled at the bank.
For this project, I was the sole designer responsible for all stages of the design thinking process. In discovery phase, I set up Need gathering sessions with stakeholders to define the problem, did user interviews and competitive analysis to validate that problem, explored IAs and data visualizations, designed new components as an addition to the Design library, made prototype and test the design with users to ensure the most effective solution
To understand how inventory management works, we need to know about card fulfillment process at marqeta. Imagine a customer, like Doordash, would like to issue physical credit cards for their drivers to pay restaurants when they pick up food for their Doordash customers.
They have to first order blank cards to card providers. They do it with the help of the card fulfillment team who prepares the order in a manual process.
Then the provider manufactures the cards and keep it in their inventory.
They have to monitor the inventory at all times to make sure they have enough blank cards for times they need to use them.
If an inventory is at the risk of running out of cards, they have to reorder more blank cards to refill it. This process is done through a lot of back and forths between CF, CS, and Doordash through weekly meetings, calls, and emails.
When Doordash wants to issue card for their drivers, they provide cardholder info for the CF, and them CF prepares the order for the card provider
To print them on th blank cards and
Send them to the cardholders.
My understanding started with interviewing CF and CS users to take me through their current flows and tell what customers ask them to know about their inventory and what they need to know to keep their level of inventory.
Customers need an easy way to quickly and accurately track their inventory and reorder when the level is low, so that they always have enough cards for their cardholders.
The next question was what is wrong with the current process. What are some of their pain points that make this experience this much painful for them.
I developed two persona types as our main users, customers and their representatives at Marqeta because they are the main end users of this tool. Their main goal is to understand when to order new inventory and reduce the risk of running out of cards. And ther pain is the current tracking method has the risk of missing info and empty inventory.
How might we help customers stay up to date on their inventory level and get notified when to reorder in a timely manner to ensure they never run out of cards.
Having the list of data and insights that the customers need to know about their inventory, I started exploring different visualizations. For context, card inventory is a list of card packages that depending on their programs they might include other items next to card like carrier, labl, and envelop. Each item has its own number of units, calculated reorder and outage date and usage rate.
after usability testing with the internal users I found out the most important piece of information they need is when to reorder so they know the action they should take to avoid running out of cards.
After another round of interviews with the internal users, we came up with a solution that includes defining threshold where Marqueta will send out notification emails to the customers reminding them that a certain period of time is remaining until they run out of time. We defined five thresholds that included warning messages all the way to the last email when they pass the 30 day threshold.
Based on the basic and most important need of users, I added a horizontal bar charts (Urgency to reorder0 on the top of the inventory page that represents the thresholds where the users need to identify the status of their card inventory. It is color coded and labeled giving the user enough information to know what they have in their inventory and when they need to reorder it.
Also, instead of card and grid patterns, I used grouped table component since it allowed the users to view more items in one page. I added a column called "Urgency" the represented different statuses of urgency (low, high, critical, inactive) for individual card SKUs. This way the users could easily filter the table based on the urgency status and find the items which needs their attention.
By clicking on each card package, the users could view the package data in more detail along with a bar chart showing usage over time for each indivual items of a card package.
Prototype will be privided upon request.