← Back to Home
Warehouse PDA App cover

Case study · Bulut

Warehouse PDA App

A handheld app for scanning, counting and checking stock

Role
Product Designer
Context
Bulut
Tools
WarehousePDAMobile

01

Context

The problem

Warehouse staff work with a handheld PDA scanner, usually standing at a shelf with one hand busy. The app gathers their jobs on one dashboard (inventory count, picking, put-away, quality control, quantity control and internal transfers) and walks them through each one by scanning a location or a serial number.

What was broken

A PDA screen is small and used on the move, so every screen has to read at a glance and every action has to take as few taps as possible. The jobs differ in what they check, yet staff should not have to learn a new pattern for each one.

02

Approach

How I got there

  1. 01

    Reviewed warehouse handheld apps for put-away, picking, counting and receiving, and compared how each handles scanning, task detail, confirmation and exceptions.

  2. 02

    Mapped every job to the same path: a task list, a task card with one start button, a scan step, and a status for each row.

  3. 03

    Kept the controls large and the language short, so a job can be read and confirmed one-handed.

03

Solution

What I designed

  • A dashboard with one tile per job, each showing how many items are waiting.
  • Task cards that show only the essentials (receipt number, send date, site, warehouse, serial count) with a single start button; product details fold under "More".
  • A camera screen with a clear frame, a short instruction and a dedicated scan-location tab.
  • A serial list for quantity and quality control with status filters, an "8 of 8" counter, a status for every row and a reason shown for damaged or rejected items.
  • A finish button that stays disabled until every row has a status, with a line under it saying how many rows remain.

04

Impact

Results

  • Six warehouse jobs share one dashboard, one task card and one scan pattern.
  • Exceptions (damaged, rejected, pending) are recorded on the row with a reason instead of in a separate step.
  • The finish step cannot be reached with unresolved rows, which keeps counts complete.

Requester side

Mobile app (PWA)

Splash
Sign in
Job dashboard
Inventory count tasks
Scan a location
Task details
Quantity control
Quality control

Discovery

Research

Competitor review: put-away and pickingOperator apps for put-away and picking. Common ground: a full-screen camera with a floating prompt, a bottom sheet holding the task (source and destination bin, handling units, serial), a confirmation dialog before a bin is committed, and a one-step menu for exceptions such as skipping a task, confirming zero quantity or verifying by hand.
Competitor review: counting and receivingCounting and receiving apps. Common ground: a progress stepper for the order, quantity chips per item, a dialog that settles discrepancies before an item is marked counted, damaged quantity entered beside the received quantity, and a scanned document that fills in order details.

Handover

Stakeholder presentation

The PDA app, presented to stakeholdersA frame from the online session where the PDA app was walked through live: adding an item to a counted location, with its unit and quantity, then choosing to add and scan the next item or to add and finish the count.