Redesigning book production software
Target User:
Print Manufacturing operators, managers, site leaders, quality control associates and printer vendors
Team:
3 Product Managers
19 Developers
1 UX research contractor - foundational research
1 UX designer
My Role:
UX designer & Research limited to usability testing
Focus Area
UX strategy
Information Architecture
Participatory design sprints
Usability testing
Background :
Amazon Books ( Print on Demand) owns 18 print facilities across the globe to print, trim, bind and ship books. The print facilities with 5000+ operators were using 15-year old software to manage and produce books.
Impact:
7.24% increase in book production and $ 10 million annual savings due to reduced wastage
Problem statement
Constrained print book production
counterintuitive interface and poor error detection capabilities of 15-year old print manufacturing software caused operator errors. The software's obsolete architecture prevents integration with modern printing equipment and provides no visibility into our outsourced book production work.
Strategic liability threatening our market position and growth potential
The outdated system results in production delays, material waste, lengthy operator training, and compromised quality control. While our competitors leverage modern manufacturing software, our reliance on this antiquated system is not just an operational headache—it's a strategic liability threatening our market position and growth potential.
User Groups
Solution - UX strategy
Rebuilding a product from ground-up is a rare and once-in-a-decade chance to redefine your product trajectory - not just refine task flows. A focused UX strategy transformed that moment into strategic, build-ready roadmap you can stand behind.
Vision
Grounded in strategic thinking, we will rebuild print manufacturing software through evidence-driven design, creating intuitive workflows, transparent data, and adaptive automation that will cut waste, accelerate book production, adaptable and delight every stakeholder across the production.
Goals & success metrics
Purpose
Business Goal
User Goal
Success metrics
Replace legacy task flows with intuitive task flows that cut time, waste and error
Maintain baseline book production rate and reduce operation waste
Print, bind and trim paperback book with fewer mistakes and higher quality
Book production rate should be more than or equal to baseline rate.
Error rate should be less than 5%
Usability rating should be more than 80.
Turn production data into forward-looking, actionable insights
Use data visualization to improve core workflow
Adapt and change book production and operator assignments based on predictive analytics
Improved book production rate
Reduced error rates
Improved decision making
Forecast accuracy
Automate repetitive tasks and improve performance with AI-assistant
Increase book production and lower operational cost
Use AI assistant to imrpove workflow, reduce errors, impact of workload and fatigue.
Build user trust in AI assisted workflow
Improved book production as compared to previous phase rollouts.
Reduced quality issues.
Human trust score
Roadmap and prioritization
The roadmap was mainly planned and prioritized to fix the basics, unlock insights and then automate error prone tasks.
Phase 1 - Print site operators workflow redesigning who are printing, triming and binding books
Phase 2 - Dashboard redesign to help managers monitor and manage book production
Phase 3 - Designing intelligent book production workflow
Redesigning task flows with participatory sprints
I conducted multiple participatory design sprints that put real experts - the users- at the center of every decisions. Instead of presenting mockups for critique, we co-created 15 task flows side-by-side.
Validating designs with users
I conducted usability test for all 15 proposed task flows. These usability test report helped to build user feedback repository which continously helped us to pivot the project in right direction and refine our roadmap.
Recognition
I was awarded by Books UX studio for 'delivering the result' for critical print manufacturing software which will unblock print book's future expansion.
Design Process
Foundational User research
Before sketching single screen, we needed to understand user needs. The legacy software was patched for years and each stakeholder carried a different story about what "really" slowed production. A foundational research helped us to understand:
Understand user needs, core workflows, pain-points and workarounds
Find dependencies across diverse user groups
Quantify where design efforts would deliver the biggest operational win
To understand the problem space from multiple perspective and cross validate findings, we triangulated user feedback
Contextual inquiry - Shadowed 11 operators to understand real-time interactions
Semi-structured interviews - Interviewed 6 operators and 5 managers to understand goals, constarints, and success metrics
Baseline analytics review - Reviewed help tickets, error logs and production metrics for last 6 months.
Research Insights
The critical research findings was -
User attention is divided between screen and physical task. It is impacted by other factors like peripheral vision, noise, workload, fatigue etc.
Users need help in managing their work across the day.
Users need overview of their task before diving deep into work.
Participatory Design Sprints
The most valuable domain knowledge of 15 year old legacy software lived in operator's muscle memory and manager's workaround shortcuts. Inviting those users into design sprints turned them from 'testers' to 'co-designers'. It helped us to get access to unfiltered expertise, instant validity and shared ownership. In addition to improved design quality, I was able to reduce iteration cycles and handoff designs faster.
Understand - 3 day brainstorming session
Lightening talks - Operators, manager and site leaders had five minutes each to "show, not tell" their biggest daily friction to create shared baseline and understand blind-spots in foundational research.
Finding opportunity area ( How might we…) - All the stakeholders reviewed pain points and discussed possible opportunity area. After grouping opportunity areas, we were able to understand high-impact problem space.
Task flow mapping - The group co-built task flow of entire manufacturing operation, including edge-cases and site-specific use cases.
Empathy-building exercise - The team members swap the hats - operators critiqued screens as managers and vice versa.
User journey map - I layered all the goals, pint-points, quotes, touch-points, metrics and emotions to visualize high-impact areas
Define
User Persona - I distilled foundational research and journey map into user personas outlining goals and needs.
Use cases - I catalogued all common use cases, edge cases, error cases and site-specific cases
Tenets - I collaborated actively with product managers to revisit tenets which could be used as our guidelines.
Success metrics - I reviewed all of the above with product managers to align UX metrics with business metrics.
Prioritization Matrix - All the stakeholders helped me to plot use cases on impact vs usage matrix.
Design
The foundation research, brainstorming sessions, defined requirements and users' active participation helped me to move faster on designs.
Launched designs
These designs launched in 18 print sites across North America, Europe, Japan and Australia in phases in 2024. The new software increased book production by 7.24% and saved $ 10 million annually.
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