Norman's Nursery | Inventory App System
Norman’s Nursery needed a faster way to capture and share live plant inventory across multiple yards. Their old process took hours or days and often cost them sales. I designed a custom iOS, iPad, and web experience that let yard teams upload photos and update inventory instantly. The new workflow gives the sales team real-time data so they can respond to customers immediately.
Lead UX Designer
UI Designer
UX Researcher
My Team
Product Manager
Stakeholders
Engineer
12 weeks
Challenge
Yard teams were using a slow, manual process to take photos and share current inventory. Images lived on personal phones, outdated photos caused mistakes, and sales reps had no real visibility into what was actually available. The lag created lost sales and frustration across teams.
Results
The new app allowed teams to take photos, add details, and update inventory instantly. Sales reps gained real-time visibility, reducing delays, errors, and back-and-forth calls. The faster workflow helped teams respond to customers immediately and support more accurate ordering.
Key outcomes:
Instant photo capture and upload
Real-time shared database across all yards
Faster customer response times
Reduced risk of selling out-of-date inventory
62%
Faster turnaround
48%
Reduction in outdated photos
3x
More photos shared
Process
Research & Interviews: Interviewed yard workers, sales reps, and department leads to understand how photos and inventory were being tracked. The biggest issues surfaced quickly: outdated images, slow communication, and inconsistent workflows across yards.
Flow planning & IA: Mapped out the core actions for both iOS and web, then built sitemaps to define how users would search, update, and share plant inventory. This aligned the team on a clear, cross-platform flow.
Sketches & Wireframes: Explored early concepts through rough sketches, then moved into mid-fidelity wireframes to refine layout, hierarchy, and the end-to-end update flow.
Prototyping & Iteration: Built interactive prototypes to validate the flow and collaborated closely with devs to solve issues uncovered during early testing, including simplifying the photo-upload step.
Usability Testing: We tested the prototype with yard team members to evaluate speed and clarity. Their feedback shaped improvements to navigation, labels, and task order.
Visual Design: I created a clean visual system optimized for outdoor use, quick scanning, bilingual content, and easy hand-off across iOS, iPad, and web.
Conclusion
The new inventory app turned a slow and outdated process into a fast, real-time workflow that supports both yard and sales teams. By giving everyone immediate access to accurate inventory photos and data, the experience helped reduce errors, strengthen customer trust, and streamline daily work for a large team spread across multiple yards. Practical UX decisions translated into real gains for both internal operations and sales.
