Cognitive Experience
for Business Transaction Intelligence
We explored what it meant to be cognitive, and how we could bring it to our users.
ROLES:
Product Design / UX Writing
The Vision
Watson Supply Chain is a suite of applications that allows business customers to track and manage every step in their supply chain. Each application in the suite serves a separate purpose, and customers were able to purchase them a la carte or as part of a package. While it was highly customizable, users were forced to constantly switch between applications to get answers. There was no way to get a bird’s eye view of everything that was happening and no way to see how metrics from different products might influence each other.
We wanted to create something that would contain all these separate pieces of the portfolio into one experience. In the Watson interaction, a user could ask anything about any point, status, or metric in the supply chain, and get actionable, intelligent feedback in real-time. Since a lot of our users’ work was time-sensitive, this would be vital. Getting that crucial feedback could allow that user to save financially on costly mistakes, such as missing shipment times. The dashboard was a one-stop place to see all the working pieces at once. Users could receive notifications on upcoming SLAs (service-level agreements), receive suggestions based on historical data, and view order statuses in real-time. All this to make managing the supply chain effortless.
Ask Watson
The team collaborated on the Watson interaction. We brainstormed on the best way to visualize the information that Watson may produce in a dynamic, easy to digest way. The user could type in a question about any point in the supply chain, maybe a status update, maybe a question on how to improve performance. Using natural language (a new API at the time) users could type in much the same way one would type a question into Google with no extra thought or grammar editing required. We also wanted to include voice (it was another of the new Watson APIs released at the time) as another useful point of interaction.
Below is the result of our work.
Cognitive Landing Page
The dashboard was a two-day collaboration session with another User Experience designer. Our team lead had a vision for a central location where a user could view outputs from all the products in the suite powered by Watson’s cognitive capabilities. We brainstormed and came up with what we thought was the best way to combine and display the most important outputs of the products in the suite. We prioritized SLAs (which when missed incur financial penalties, so users need to stay on top of those deadlines), order statuses, and included cognitively derived suggestions based on trends in the data. We also displayed changes in key performance indicators in a dynamic data visualization.
From the dashboard, a user could access products in the suite organically. For example, in the as-is scenario, if a user wanted to track their EDI documents, they would have to remember that OnTrack managed EDI documents, and InFlight managed CSV files. In the to-be scenario, a user can see metrics from both products displayed on the dashboard organically. Less mental energy is wasted on trying to remember which product performs which function. The focus would instead be on the metrics, and what they mean to the user.
Below is the result of our work.
