Inventory TrackeriOS & Web App
Designing a custom native and web application to replace a slow, manual photo-sharing process, giving yard and sales teams real-time inventory visibility across all locations.
A process that costs them sales every day
Norman's Nursery is a 1,000-plus-person wholesale nursery based in Southern California, with multiple yard locations. Their old process for capturing and sharing plant inventory photos was entirely manual, with images stored on personal phones. Employees communicated via text or email, and customers often waited days for photos that should have taken minutes.
The lag wasn't just inconvenient; it was directly measurable in lost orders. By the time photos reached the customer, the opportunity was often lost to vendors who could respond faster.
Listening before designing anything
Before wireframing a single screen, I interviewed four team members across departments, which included the COO, Inventory Manager, Tagging Coordinator, and a Sales Rep. Their pain points shaped every product decision.
The COO: "The biggest frustration is the time it takes to get photos back. We don't have the staff to do all of the photos." She needed a scalable system, not more headcount.
The Sales Rep: "If I could get pictures to my clients faster, I'd close 20–25% more orders." Speed wasn't a nice-to-have; it was a competitive advantage.
Plants are a living inventory that change daily, growing, dying, and selling. Keeping photos up to date across a multi-yard operation is impossible without real-time tooling. Every design decision had to account for the fact that the data would be constantly changing.
Four distinct roles, one connected system
Each user type has a specific job in the inventory workflow, and the app needed to serve all of them without adding friction. The system architecture maps each role to a platform optimized for where and how they work.
- Takes photos and enters metadata (size, quantity) via iPhone directly in the yard.
- Searches, reviews, and curates photos. Edits data and archives stale inventory.
- Searches, saves to cart, and batch-downloads photos to share with customers.
- Receives a single image URL with no login required. Current photos, instantly.
iOS — Photo Capture
Web — Inventory Search
A broken workflow, rebuilt from the ground up
- Photo requests fulfilled several hours or days later
- Images on personal phones with no central system
- Outdated photos shared the wrong plants or the wrong sizes
- No visibility into available inventory unless you were in the field
- Sales lost to vendors who responded faster
- Photos captured and uploaded to the cloud instantly
- Shared database visible across all departments
- Real-time inventory with current metadata and sizing
- Sales team can search, save, and batch-download
- Customer response time turned days into minutes
Testing with real users, not assumptions
Ran usability sessions with six participants covering registration, plant search, yard selection, photo upload, and data submission. Feedback shaped significant improvements.
What we validated
- The capture-to-cloud flow worked intuitively for yard workers.
- Sales team search-and-download was fast.
- The shared database eliminated the back-and-forth communication entirely.
What we refined
- Photo upload button placement caused confusion about the task sequence, so we redesigned before the next round.
- Navigation labels needed simplification.
- The camera tool integration needed streamlining for multi-photo uploads.
- Added bilingual support for Spanish-speaking yard workers.
Results that moved the business
- 62% faster photo turnaround, turning hours into minutes.
- 48% reduction in outdated photos reaching customers.
- 3x more photos shared across all yard locations. For the first time, all departments share a single source of truth.
The iOS app launched first, which put the most critical workflow (photo capture) in the hands of yard workers immediately. The web application followed, completing the full cross-department experience. Leadership gained real visibility into inventory volume, and the platform now supports the full inventory lifecycle from capture to archive across a 1,000-plus-person operation.