My Role
I had the pleasure of wearing many hats throughout this project (Design Strategist, Researcher, Technologist, UX / UI designer). The team consisted of a Director of Product Management and myself. We were tasked with looking across PTC’s product landscape in an effort to find new ways to bring value to enterprise customers. PTC has a complete software suite that allows companies to design, engineer, manufacture, service, and gather real-time device metrics. Often times, enterprise manufacturers use multiple PTC products and, therefore, have access to a variety of these data combinations. How could we help these companies effectively use all this data?
Concept
Through multiple informational interviews with PTC clients and internal SMEs we discovered some common threads in regards to data availability. Enterprise manufacturers create 3D models, store BOMs, track manufacturing, and are increasingly gathering data from their IoT devices operating in the field, but this ‘big data’ is often not put to good use.
This concept leverages ‘big data’ to make each subsequent generation of IoT products more reliable, efficient, and profitable. Product Managers and Design Engineers can use this solution to discover improvement opportunities based on aggregated product usage trends, performance data, and quality issues. This eliminates the “fuzzy front-end” most PMs face when planning design improvements for the next generation of a product. They are swimming in data and don’t know where to start.
By surfacing large-scale opportunities such as the most common performance issues, the costliest repairs, and even regional usage differences PMs and Design Engineers can prioritize the next generation’s design updates. (For this concept I focused on a global OEM of appliances - the example uses washing machines).
Storyboarding
I created the bellow storyboard as a communication tool to illustrate the primary use case for our solution to senior stakeholders and cross functional team members.
