October 30, 2024
The Value of Design Sprints: Morressier’s Integrity Manager
In 2023, Morressier launched Integrity Manager to address integrity issues in scholarly publishing. To sustain the product's momentum and unlock sales opportunities, we lead a Design Sprint in early 2024 that sought to elevate the product market appeal.
Project Context
In early 2024, Morressier faced issues that blocked Integrity Manager sales: customers valued the product’s integrity checks, but needed tools to act on detected compromises, not just identify them. The current offering added extra steps, reducing efficiency, so I and a fellow Designer decided to lead a Design Sprint to get actionability and efficiency to the forefront.
Company & Product
Morressier is a platform that focuses on providing publishing tools for Scholarly Publishers and Societies, such as AI-powered research integrity solutions like Integrity Manager: a web app focused on detecting issues in scholarly work through preflight and integrity checks that suggest measures to take, all in a single dashboard for ease of use.
Team
2 Senior Product Designers, 1 Senior Product Manager, 1 Staff User Researcher
Timeline
1 ½ Week Design Sprint — sprint outcomes are undergoing Development at the time of writing
Impact
6 Closed Deals with Medium and Large Publishers, Weighted Deal Amount of 597,390$ (Q4 2024), -60% Expected Reduced Product Assessment Time
Research Integrity in the Scientific Universe
In the scientific publishing world, research integrity is the practice of conducting trustful research. This includes the whole research lifecycle, from sourcing hypotheses for an article, to publishing it. It’s easy to manipulate facts today, and the consequences of this are concerning for Publishers in the industry: as headlines of scientific fraud go viral, the reach, reputation and value of Publishers are affected, launching them in strenuous investigation processes.
In a Morressier survey of 250 research community members, 76% rated research integrity as important to their organization — Publishers need tools that can detect issues and oversee integrity breaches across the Authors, Reviewers and Editors that operate in the publication lifecycle.
To address this, Morressier launched Integrity Manager in 2023: a service integrated across all Morressier solutions (Journal Manager, Proceedings Manager), using checks to detect issues like fraud and plagiarism, ensuring high standards of integrity in every submission sent to a Publisher.
The Problem
The initial release of the product placed Morressier as a player in the integrity map. However, as Q1 2024 rolled in, we saw that prospects are interested...but we’re struggling to close them. We need an attractive product that’s relevant for our market — what’s stopping us from doing so? From sales call insights collected by our User Researcher, we detected efficiency issues to fix:
To address this, the lead designer on the Integrity team, Lanre Fadire and I wanted to know the origins of these issues. As the situation called for design-thinking, conducting a Design Sprint felt like a natural and low-cost way to do support the product without pulling developers away from their critical work.
We used the outcomes of previous successful Design Sprints as examples to gain organizational support. With full backing from the CTO and Product VP, we aligned internally to decide the best people to run the sprint and set Integrity Manager on a path toward success.
Sprint Team
The sprint was led by Lanre Fadire and I, both Senior Product Designers with the most comprehensive view of all Morressier Integrity products. We conducted internal and external usability tests with support from our Staff User Researcher, Thomas Fortmann. The Integrity Team Product Manager, Mădălina Pop, served as the Decider, aligning us with the sprint goal and and breaking ties when needed.
Feel free to check out all of these wonderful people in the Team Shoutout section!
Defining the Sprint Goal
As we started the sprint evaluating the context before us, it was clear each of us had a high volume of questions that needed to be prioritized. We wrote them all down, posing them as How Might We (HMW) questions, and voted on the most compelling ones:
How can Integrity Manager boost operational efficiency, enhance decision-making and bring value to Publishers through flexible solutions? How can Integrity Manager tell stories with data, make solid suggestions? These questions have a common denominator between them: they seek to make Integrity Manager easier to handle and understand. Hence, our goal became:
“Increase Integrity Manager workflow efficiency”
On its own, but also on every Morressier product using Integrity Manager integrations.
Sprint Structure
After digging into the problem and defining the goal, we started Sketching and Ideating to then Decide on the best ideas so that they could be Prototyped and Tested with key users.
Discovery
We started the sprint with the right foot by compiling and analyzing client feedback: every sprint player was aligned and wholly informed, which made it easier to focus on the right issues and map out processes.
Sketching / Ideating / Deciding
Before sketching, we reviewed our design backlog to draw inspiration from previous explorations. With an inspired mind and a mighty pen, we began sketching!
Next, when voting on which sketches to bring to life, we prioritized ideas that could provide useful context plus actions to act on it — to clearly separate ideas that were critical to hit the sprint goal, and nice-to-haves.
We took this focused approach to a solution stitching and assembling session between all sprint players, where we pieced together a complete solution according to the selected sketches.
Testing the Prototype
With our sketches ready, we began prototyping on day 4 of the sprint. Both designers took turns building and QA-testing the prototype, and preparing usability testing scripts: our aim was to stay flexible and ready for next-day tests, ensuring we could continuously collect data as needed.
To gather balanced insights, we took two days to test the prototype with:
- 4 internal team members with advanced domain knowledge;
- 2 customer representatives: a Head of Research Integrity and Peer Review and a Research Integrity Manager at a large scientific publishing house (revenues over $8m annually, with a publication business >50% of their total revenue).
Sprint Findings
After completing the tests, we analyzed the collected insights to create a post-sprint plan, determining next steps for implementation, additional testing, and prepared to communicate the following sprint findings across teams!
Words Matter!
Copy is an important aspect of the Integrity experience: it’s a catalyst towards taking action, especially for the power users that use our product.
Workspace pages and settings for Permissions were areas on which copy needed to be stronger for us to hit the Sprint Goal. Even in well received UI like email issue reports, copy needed to be reworked in order to communicate trust and drive users towards action.
Small Actions, Big Impact
We learned that a simple action such as sharing a report, or marking an issue as resolved, is more complex than we think. For example, what if a report is shared with the wrong people? How can we play it safe?
Actions like marking issues as resolved and investigating activity logs were well-received: they help reviewers stay informed on which issues have been addressed, improving overall efficiency.
Interactive Elements Need Action
Visually appealing data has limited value if customers can’t explore correlations or understand what each data point means.
Testers wanted to click on indicators for more details, receive actionable recommendations (e.g., steps to verify authorship of a suspicious paper), collapse data points or detect which papers contain a combination of selected issues (e.g. how many papers have image duplication AND citation problems?)
To make accurate investigations, guidance through guides or contextual details is needed to understand the data and its possibilities. Our users also expect data dashboards to reveal trends and provide reports. Without these contextual tools, users are less likely to understand Integrity Manager's value.
Conclusion
To increase Integrity Manager's workflow efficiency and product attractivity, we need to make it highly actionable, intuitive, and contextually informative for users.
Our design sprint showed us that users like data points, lists of issues to check when investigating an article’s content, but love the ability to interact with that information meaningfully. By supporting actionability with the right context, using simple mechanisms, we can enable seamless collaboration across Investigation teams and empower them to make confident decisions, in the name of legitimate science!
Impact
6
Closed Deals with Medium and Large Publishers
597,390$
2024 Weighted Deal Amount
-60%
Expected Reduced Product Assessment Time
Sprint Takeaways
Expand a sprint if you can reach more testers – especially if they are deeply related to the problem we’re trying to solve.
Managing time effectively in early sprint phases is essential so that we don’t have to crunch later in the process to get a prototype ready for testing!
Lastly...keep it simple: As designers, we are biased into constantly optimizing. For example: we thought grouping checks with added recommendations would improve readability and focus, but this approach didn’t impact the workflow much — most users actually preferred seeing all checks at once!
Sprint Outcomes
Afterwards, the Integrity Team integrated 5 key outcomes into their product roadmap, such as marking checks as acknowledged, building correlations across multiple checks to identify networks of suspicious authors, and enhancing the analytics capabilities with actionable recommendations.
This sprint also launched a new step to the Integrity team’s modus operandi: using design sprints to frequently gather early feedback, leverage organizational/customer knowledge, and give extended teams a feel of what’s coming next!
Team Shoutout
A big big thank you to my lovely colleagues who helped to make this happen…
Lanre Fadire (Linkedin, Portfolio) thank you for being a great design partner in my entire Morressier journey, and for letting me do this sprint with you. I love that our collaboration has reached even each other’s portfolio!
Thomas Fortmann (Linkedin) and Mădălina Pop (Linkedin): thank you the friendliness and support, for providing great insights, and for helping to make this sprint happen in the first place!