Challenge:

I am an IT analyst working for the development of a large sports goods manufacturing  organization’s Product Planning tool. The Product Planning tool consists of 250+ attributes to be  filled during the creation process of the product. The attributes are dependent on each other with  each having its own independent validations. The products that gets created is of massive scale  and roughly 8000 products get planned per season by 200 creators. Filling up 250+ attributes per  product is an extremely tedious task. The challenge was to place the 250+ attributes in a  meaningful way in the creation template which would avoid the inefficiencies and delays in the  product creation process. Yet another challenge was to understand the usage of the attributes by  the creators, which would help us in grouping the attributes.

Selection:

We from the IT team, thought through the design thinking tools and decided to go ahead with  Visualization via card sorting. The research technique that we used was Card sorting exercise, which  helped us in understanding the creators’ constructs in placing the 250+ attributes in logical groups.  Most importantly, card sorting exercise gave us insights on how the creators perceive the domain  of each of the attributes in their daily work.

Application:

Since the card sorting exercise was with limited set of users and could not be done with all 200  creators, we built the logical grouping of attributes iteratively, consuming the feedback received  by all the users later from business operations. For our first go-live with the new form of creation,  we focused on basic set of attributes which are business critical and important for the creators. The  first iteration of creation form tested our understanding of the attributes and their usage by the  creators.

Iteratively, we included other complex attributes with a continuous feedback from the creators. The  second and third iterations tested our assumption - ‘prioritization of complex attributes against  the business milestones was the main cause of the challenge in developing the creation form’.  Again, with the continuous feedback by the creators, we were able to implement a meaningful  structure of attributes covering all aspects of the business in the application.

Insight:

Every consecutive iteration while building the new creation form not just built the creation form  for the creators in a non-intrusive way, it also helped us understand that business milestones was  the key for each of the attributes in creation form. This was the leverage for us to make the impact  and build an efficient creation form.

A noteworthy mention: by our first iteration we also placed a backend auto reporting tool which  traces sequentially the number of clicks, tabular movements & other user interface usage metrics.  The tracking tool was made aware to the creators as well during the card sorting exercise. With the  additional information from the tracking tool of UI, we were able to provide more value-adds to

the creators in their daily work of creation process. For example, creators use multiple text  attributes and type in the same value in different attributes which was traced by the tracking tool.  Accordingly, we developed a simple multiple select and copy-paste feature within the form view.

Approach:

The application with the new creation form proved to be the right approach which resulted in  creation efficiency increase by 95% in comparison with the old school excel and email exchange  mode of creation. Then onwards every product that was built was created by the tool. The simple  creation form led to a development of complex lifecycle management tool and continues to be  built in an iterative way.

