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Product Digital User Experience    Challenge:   I work for a company that produces components for industrial and automotive  applications. Users of these products can range from maintenance and production  engineers to truck drivers. These products are mainly commercialized via Distributors  who are located closer to these customers across all continents. The challenge that I  have is identifying the major barriers that these users experience when searching for  product information on our website and digital tools. This, in the context of finding a  catalogue part replacement or finding a customized solution for their application.     An additional challenge is identifying cross-promotion opportunities that could be done  with other products from the same company and finally, identify how users see our  product digital vision long-term. This should give us a better understanding of what we  need to prioritize in our digital development roadmap.     Selection and Application: I selected mind-mapping (ref. Marketing Kristen Shaw video) and visualization tools (Angela Myer, Designer, video) to identify not only  the major requirements but also the hierarchy in the users’ decision process.     To get quality input for doing the mind-mapping analysis, we carried out in-depth  interviews with users and collected the feedback that we grouped in observations,  factual statements and direct quotations. Thereafter, we got together with our marketing  and communication team to make affinity mappings and discuss different cluster  possibilities, based on mind-mapping technique. These helped us to identify the major  groupings and major barriers that users face when trying to get information about our  product when using digital tools. This set the basis for users’ criteria and problems that  our digital tools need to solve.

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In addition, I used visualization technique, creating a diagram to sort-out the major  processes and steps that users take when searching for our product information. This  helps us to understand the hierarchy and importance of each step before a user decides  to buy from us or not.

Insight:   By using both mind mapping and visualization tools, we were able to not only identify the  major needs in the process but also the major barriers that user face to fulfill those  needs. For example, we realize that a lot of efforts are put on generating content for  developing the value proposition and express “why we are different” but this step is not  the first one that users take to buy from us. The first one is finding the part. Therefore,  the need for a complete search and interchange tool to find those parts is more critical.  This approach helped involved teams to understand better the process and where we  are dedicating our efforts and where they should be. All in all, these help us to prioritize  better.     Approach: For the next time, I might apply story telling technique to have better  understanding of different personas journey. For example, what the process would look  like for a maintenance engineer as oppose to a purchasing manager in certain industry.  Learning launch tool from Karl-Heinz Scheller is something that I’d like to try, to test the  improvement ideas that we would like to introduce in the digital tools for our products to  see if they work or not and be able to be more agile in the improvement process.

