A German sports clothing and accessories major wanted to organize, streamline and simplify its product management capabilities. They had a presence across a dozen applications used by their Global Product Management (GPM) team. The GPM team was responsible for executing business processes for multiple brands and markets, from product planning to retail shelf positioning. It was an enormous challenge for them. The customer wanted a partner who could design an application which brings structure and discipline to the product management activities. This would provide a simple and intuitive user interface to end users.
Business challenge
- Complex and inefficient business process, supported by poorly integrated systems, impacted overall business performance.
- Confusion across departments, created by poor data handling, redundant data entries, duplication of data across multiple systems and data mismatch during downstream consolidation.
- Simultaneous work was done on multiple applications for data entry and information access. This resulted in productivity loss and lower job satisfaction.
- Lack of sharing, collaboration and transparency between different teams within the enterprise resulted in suboptimal business operations.
Our approach
- The Mindtree team worked closely with the product managers to understand their needs and business processes.
- Idea generation techniques for the unified portal resulted in several concepts. They were presented in the form of rough sketches, wireframes and prototypes.
- Initial design iterations were tested on desirability and usability aspects with real end users and this feedback was captured as design refinements.
- Clickable prototypes were developed to test on end users and avoid major design roadblocks at the end of the development phase.
- The team conducted usability testing of the final application. Design refinements were made based on test results and recommendations by the usability engineering team.
Our solution
Defining a uniform system:
- Creation of a library to define the user experience of platform architecture in terms of components and interactions involved.
- The overall architecture helped in creating a consistent and user friendly interface.
- The process flow and navigation provided a flexible and expandable solution.
Task breakdown:
- Each complex process was broken down into tasks.
- Limitations were decided in order to make the screens look less crowded and focus on the task being performed.
Action oriented design:
- Actions on each screen was made contextual.
- Specific actions were available based on selection, thereby avoiding confusion and providing direction to the tasks performed.
Principle of ‘progressive disclosure’:
- Home screens displayed the overview.
- Information could be accessed by the user based on the task being performed.
Business impact
- The portal seamlessly integrated several existing applications, reducing the overall cost of ownership of these systems.
- The end user community could focus on core product management activities as opposed to data entry and other system related tasks.
- This lead to fewer products being dropped, reduced rework, improved clarity and confidence in overall product management.
- The GPM team could now work efficiently on a single platform that was simple, intuitive and efficient.
- Enhanced overall business performance.
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