Cognitive walkthrough / contextual inquiries / prototyping

Design, prototype, and test features to lift Project Mercury out of its MVP platform

“Documenting and communicating changes that have occurred to a mass-produced product is a key job requirement for many product managers. When a change in the fit, form, function or price of a product is introduced, a product manager issues a Product Change Notification (PCN) to their customers in order to share what changes have occurred. Today, this process happens through a variety of mechanisms (e.g., Microsoft Word template > PDF > Dropbox file shared with customers; posting change notices on a company blog), with little standardization and many opportunities for missed communication between businesses and customers. Project Mercury is an MVP platform to address these key challenges with documenting and communicating changes to products, including new product introductions (NPIs), end-of-life announcement (EOLs) and all other product change notifications (PCNs)” -Andy R, Stakeholder. What happens when a product change isn’t communicated well? Production lines go down, end consumers become upset, hours or days are waisted on the phone between manufacturers and distributors. Manufacturers are missing vital opportunities to create genuine cohesion between production lines and end consumers. PCNs are issued by manufacturers to inform customers about a change to a mass-produced product or its manufacturing process. A New Product Introduction (NPI) encompasses all the activities within an organization to define, develop and launch a new or improved product. "End-of-life" (EOL) is a term used with respect to a product supplied to customers, indicating a product is in the end of its useful life (from the manufacturers point of view). It is meant to standardize the creation process and streamline the distribution of that information to those who need to know it. Project Mercury is a web application that facilitates the creation and tracking of PCNs. The overall goal of Project Mercury is to streamline and standardize the PCN creation process, while providing a user-friendly experience for locating and viewing the PCNs.

Research/Evaluate

Cognitive Walkthrough

Andy provided me the key tasks a Product Manager can perform:

• Create a PCN/NPI/ or EOL

• Edit a PCN

• View a PCN

• Search for a PCN

Remote and on site cognitive walkthroughs revealed natural patterns of communicating change among companies and organizations both internal and external. The focus of the cognitive walkthrough is to understand our user’s and system's learnability for new or infrequent users. You can download the deck featuring lightly annotated visuals matching the data sheet below.

Testing

I created a system for users to be notified about their PCNs and an easy way for Project Managers to communicate that change. Project managers will have a list of “customers” as represented below to select customers who use the product that PCN is for. Once the PCN is approved by the admin, an email notification will be sent out to the PCN group with a PDF file of the PCN form. Clients can respond to that notification via a contact form. A customer service representative will receive the response and respond accordingly. Feel free to take the Invision tour!

Research Recommendations

Contextual Inquiry

Product Change Notices (PCN’s) are used among a magnitude of industries to communicate changes in product from manufacturer to end user with a distributor as the middle man. Project Mercury wants to become a key influencer in the space of PCN’s. They’re goal is to formalize the process of PCN’s so the end manufacturers are fully informed of all product changes that distributors may not convey. Currently, there is no one standardized way to communicate changes in products efficiently and consistently from manufacturer to manufacturer. This is what Project Mercury is set out to do. With average five per week roughly 260 PCN’s/ year, there is a lot of communication to be had that currently isn’t being held

End of Life (EOL’s) notices help the end users save money allowing them time to find new manufacturers for the parts they need. If an end user doesn’t find a new manufacturer or doesn’t want to, their end product will be discontinued. Manufacturers communicate product changes (PCN), new product introduction (NPI PCN), and end of life (EOL PCN) to distributers who are responsible for communicating these PCN’s to the end user. These notices are essential to the end user. When these EOLs are inaccurate, miscommunicated or worst of all not communicated it puts strain on all parties involved all the way down to the final consumer.

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