Card Sorting: Identifying relevant business KPIs to shape the information architecture of customer account performance monitoring dashboards.
📌 Project Scope:
Timeline: 7 weeks (Sept ’24 - Nov ’24)
Role: Research Lead
Tools: Optimal Workshop, Lucidspark, MS Teams
Cross-Functional Team: UX Designer, Project Manager
Stakeholders: Product Owners
Project Overview
🚀 Business Goals & Objectives:
Provide a unified view of customer accounts for internal business users to track and monitor performance changes with the help of ‘Smart Asset’ data based insights and KPIs — illuminating the darkest parts of the supply chain and enabling data-driven decision-making.
🔎 Approach:
A Card Sorting study was conducted to understand how account managers in various regions, teams and contexts interpret and utilize ‘Smart Asset’ KPIs to monitor performance and identify pallet journey anomalies across their entire customer portfolio; for a single customer account; and for a specific customer location.
🔐 Project Outcome:
The relevant KPIs identified were prioritized and used to shape the information architecture and initial design concepts for the app dashboards — creating intuitive user flows across the Account Performance solution and providing strategic direction to the project.
What prompted the research intervention?
Based on the insights from the desk research, user interviews and journey mapping exercises, there was a need to identify which KPIs are collectively most relevant to users within each of the 6 tasks as well as understand the logic and flow for performance analysis.
Research Questions:
How does each user group prioritize relevant KPIs relevant at an account level v/s a location level? How are they different?
What does a change in KPI value prompt the user to do?
Which KPIs would the user want to monitor over a period of time? What is that period of time? (e.g. to identify historic trends and patterns)
In what situation might a user compare or correlate a KPI with other KPIs?
Do users extrapolate KPI data for a given context? When, why and how?
How might we…
empower Account Managers with relevant KPIs and business insights to identify trends and performance issues early on?
enable Account Managers to take prompt data-driven actions on customer accounts?
create opportunities for Account Managers to engage in strategic yet sensitive conversations with customers?
📂 Card Sorting
💡 Card sorting is a UX methodology that helps understand how users group and organize information bits and can be useful for creating an intuitive navigation and information architecture that is based on the combined mental models of the users. This approach allowed me to observe and dig deeper into the ‘why’ of every participant’s sorting choices.
Qualitative Analysis:
Results:
Study Setup:
Tool: OptimalSort
Type: Hybrid card sort; remote; moderated
No. of Participants: 14 (across NA, LATAM, EU)
Duration: 60 minutes
Cards: 36 Business KPIs
Groups: 6 levels of performance monitoring (across customer portfolio, account and location)
Heatmap showing how frequently each card was sorted into groups. (Darker colors = higher frequency of assignment.)
Summary of Findings:
1. Users are primarily monitoring the same 'baseline' metrics; irrespective of their roles, titles and business regions (geographies).
Users referred to metrics indicative of ‘volume’ / ‘flows’ such as FTR%, Outflows, Inflows, Cycle Time & Stock; as ‘key baseline’ metrics or ‘North Star’ metrics.
2. Users want all relevant key metrics accessible in one spot, grouped together (like in a dashboard).
Having a summarized view of portfolio level KPIs and trends can be valuable when screening for performance insights as users are typically ‘reactive’ in their approach when monitoring performance.
3. However, users across various user groups are most interested in a specific customer’s network and spend maximum time & energy analyzing data at a customer level.
"FTR & Cycle Time@Distributor (EID) are like my North Stars to get a gauge of how this customer's doing, feelers for me to gauge how their portfolio's doing or if I need to reach out to the specific customer and/or location based on these metrics.”
— Retail Supply Chain Solutions | NA04@18.11
”From the portfolio view I can automatically see where I need to go across all my customers v/s having to jump from one customer to another.
— Commercial & Go-To-Market | NA07 56.35
"In the end, the portfolio allows me to see if there's something going on. And once I see something there, I dive deep in to see what might be going on."
— Retail Account Manager | SE06@19.58
4. Flow through Ratio (FTR%) is the most vital KPI to instantly gauge performance trends.
It is the starting point for identifying:
Potential pallet loss or leakage
Anomalous or restricted pallet movement
Unauthorized customer behavior
Supply chain bottle-necks
“As Account Managers, we have a baseline idea of the expected volume. FTR% help us understand if there's something that is not going well and gives context about the relationship between the ins and outs.”
— Retail | LATAM06 @ 40.19
"FTR is important on the Retail as well as Manufacturing side. Indicator of Loss Risk (account is losing pallets) or if a location is building inventory. If all of a sudden, they're returning more or less than 100%, it’s a red flag!"
— Commercial & Go-To-Market , S+ | NA07@19.06