The site and Global operations are core objects of Enterprise Performance Management for Honeywell Forge. As we were designing products for operations and maintenance managers there was an opportunity to explore the problem space for the people who manage these personas.

From the market trends and analysis, the product managers learned that the leaders would like to get visibility into their operations at the site and regional level. Today these leaders don’t have any tools that allow them to manage their end-to-end operations from one product. So the key discovery that market trends showed was that they would like to answer questions like:

• How can I compare site performance in real-time?​

• How can I see where throughput restrictions are occurring?​

• What repetitive issues are causing me to miss my number?​

• Why am I constantly moving labor around the building?​

• Will I make my number today?​

My role: Lead researcher and 1 designer. Time Spent – Approximately 3 months
As the researcher my responsibilities were:

• Defined, and maintained “voice of the customer” that included recruiting, conducting customer interviews, contextual inquiry, focus groups, user journey maps, day in a life, personas, usability studies, reporting, and UX metrics analysis.

• Applied insights from customer research and analytics to develop impactful business cases and high-level requirements.

• Defined Jobs To Be Done for personas that helped the product team understand primary user needs and define success metrics from the business perspective.

• Communicated findings from research reports into understandable, connected, and actionable insights to key stakeholders on the product and design teams, to drive meaningful action based on findings.

The Approach

The goal of this study was to understand if there was an opportunity for us to create any tools for the Site general managers and, Regional Managers in the warehouse. As a part of this effort:

• I collaborated with product managers to recruit users for our study.

• Create a study plan to conduct the user interviews. Worked with PM on the research intake workshop to make sure that the plan was in alignment with what the PM wanted out of the project.

• Moderated live conversations in User Testing platform to conduct interviews

• I was able to recruit 5 users for the Regional Manager position and, 3 users for the site General Managers position.

Few questions asked:

• What is the flow or rhythm of your day (are you in meetings, working on the floor etc.)?

• What tasks do you perform frequently?

• What are some of the systems, apps, or websites you use most?

• Describe your work environment for us—if we could meet with you, what would we see?

• Who do you work most closely with, and how do you collaborate or coordinate your work with them, when needed?

• What is frustrating/keeps you up at night?

• If you had a magic wand, what would you change about your day-to-day at work?

After the interviews, I analyzed the findings to create artifacts that could be used by the team to inform the next step.

The data from these findings were then used by the product team to analyze if there was an opportunity to create a product that could be valuable for the personas. I created a list of experience outcomes, which were validated with internal SMEs. During the validation, we learned that the tool for Site GM might not work at this point, since we had another Site tool that was giving 40% of similar information.

So we decided to work with the Regional Manager’s tool and find its product-market fit. As per the PM market analysis, we found that there were not a lot of other products that help the RM through their everyday workflow. As a long-term strategy, we realized that creating tools for this persona will help us get a lot of analytics data that might help our future product endeavors.

We prioritized JTBD with PM, Dev, and the design team as the next steps. I collaborated with the designers to create high-level requirements and concepts designs for a tool that will help The Global Regional Managers monitor the daily tasks and manage sites at the regional level.

Based on the feedback the designer created high-fidelity concepts which we tested with customers from Michaels and The Home Depot.

The Impact

Learning from the project:

• Since we were dealing with an executive persona from the industry it was very difficult to get customer contacts to speak with. If given a choice I would have been involved as a Sales rep to help us create that relationship with the customers and set the stage for them to know why we’re doing this and how this engagement would have helped them.

• This was a very fun project to work with because the problem space was so new to everyone that it felt like everyone was learning about it together, then coming with the prenotions of what it should be from the old legacy products.

• I enjoyed the part of working with the product manager to understand the outcome of the product, strategizing the value and why we should be building this product for this persona.