Pick the right equipment for your project

Pickup is a construction material procurement platform for builders and developers. Pickup aims to provide a friendly experience to browse, compare, and select the most suitable materials for their projects, as well as facilitating the project management.

Project Context

The project's conception originated from my experience assisting with my friend's family construction business. We observed that the traditional methods of communication – predominantly offline, via phone, and on paper – significantly hindered the efficiency and ease of project planning, tracking, and management. Furthermore, we identified a noticeable gap in the market for digital tools specifically designed to streamline and enhance the procurement process in the construction industry.

As the designer of the project, I worked closely with my friend’s company in order to identify the user painpoint and test the design proposal.
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My Role

UX designer, researcher

Individual

3 weeks

2022. 5

Team

Duration

Time

Research

How does the procurement process work?

Interview

In order to understand the current working process and issues, I took interviews with 5 staffs, and spent a day to observe their work. Aside from learning the overall process, I noted some of the highlights from my research.

A procurement personnel may have multiple projects on hand.
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Status tracking is communicated via phone call, which is not efficient.
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The assistant may do the evaluation, and report to the manager for final decision.
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The material evaluation comparison involves switching through different supplier websites.

The project location could be a key factor for choosing suppliers.

Sometimes the supervisor is not clear of who’s in charge of a certain project.
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The manager is doing budget calculation on paper from time to time.
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Documents for different project on table might mix together.
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Complex majors and aspects are involved in a project.

From the interview, I learned that:

From the observation, I learned that:

Product Define

A collaborative terminal that facilitate procurement experience by tracking process and managing projects.

A online construction procurement center that showcases construction products of all category.

Feature Iteration:

Improve the search bar :
The user searches the product then reads the discription, it is usually the last minute the user realizes that delivery location is unavailable, and previous work are in vain.To solve this problem, I gathered location option to the searchbar to encourage user to select the location before searching any product

Multilevel catalogue:
The product page is for contractors to find products for their project. The design challenge in this part is managing multi-level of product catalogue. The primary and secondary catalogue are expandable and foldable, which helps user to find the catalogue more efficient.

Project Management page

A procurement list of a project is consists of multiple product, each product have multiple selections. The workspace page helps the user comparing different selections. I drew out a few proposals and put them into test. After the prototype test, users are satisfied with the comparison feature and like best about the 4th proposal.

Iteration of the workspace

the project managers suggest that they want to have access to all the projects that they could monitor the status of all contracts as well as workforce dispatch. In order to deliver a clear project status, I reconstructed the project management logic.