July 21, 2024
Optimizing MVPs: Morressier’s Proceedings Manager
From 2023 to 2024, Morressier enhanced their star product: Proceedings Manager – centering the early-stage research management tool around integrity and flexibility, healing MVP-itis along the way.
Project Context
In 2023, Morressier’s star product, Proceedings Manager, faced UX issues that threatened customer satisfaction and hindered new deals. These problems, stemming from the fast-paced startup environment, also misaligned with our goal of ensuring integrity across our products. My discovery into this problem space launched a crossfunctional effort into fixing MVP-itis in two smart iterations, addressing efficiency and setting the right expectations for our users.
Company & Product
Morressier is a platform that focuses on providing publishing tools for Scholarly Publishers and Societies, such as submission management workflows like Proceedings Manager: A CMS armed with document extractions, peer review workflows and integrity tools to publish with efficiency and safety.
Team
B2B Enterprise Team with 3 Fullstack Engineers, 1 Backend Engineer, a Product Manager (from January onwards, replacing my Interim PM role).
Timeline
4 Months (two major iterations from Dec 2023 - Mar 2024)
Impact
Task Time Reduction from 4 hours to an avg of 1-2 min, 1 Enterprise Customer Signed, 3 New Enterprise Prospects
Business Context
Research misconduct is increasingly problematic in scientific publishing: in 2023, a record of more than 10,000 papers were retracted, with publishers being challenged with handling heavy retraction processes or facing impacts from their publishing decisions.
This is a threat to scientific progress and consequently, global growth. Due to this, Morressier added a strong focus to preserving Research Integrity to every step of their available publishing workflows, by creating AI-powered Integrity checks that detect issues and suggest solutions to fix them:
Goal
My Enterprise team was tasked to integrate AI-powered integrity checks and reports in Proceedings Manager (a product that extracts information from research papers, allowing Conference Organizers to send these papers to Publishers for efficient publication), to ensure integrity throughout this workflow product.
Product Pains
Besides the main goal, we also wanted to upgrade our current product offering as we geared towards a Series B round. Proceedings Manager faced four main structural issues at the time:
These issues made us think: even if we flawlessly add Integrity checks and report to Proceedings Manager, will the product be capable of maintaining high integrity standards if we don’t address the issues above mentioned?
Can we trust the product to let users know if a Paper has enough integrity to be published if we don’t have the necessary feedback to say so? Can Organizers focus on upholding Integrity standards if their workflow isn’t adequate?
We wanted to explore ways to address these issues, to find a balance between Integrity connections with necessary tech and UX improvements before focusing on the goal cut out for us.
Defining A Direction
These issues are connected through multiple functions, and to have full visibility of the pains across the Proceedings Manager journey, I gathered multiple representatives from Product, CS, Design and Engineering teams to join forces in a Journey Mapping Workshop:
On this workshop, each participant was invited to share individually what they felt were the most structural issues Proceedings Manager (PM) was facing. Then, collectively, we weaved these issues together on top of the current PM flow – more issues were found along the way, but we also found potential solutions in tune with our current goal, scalability and dependencies between our roles, which helped us to define the scope of our work.
Achieving The Balance
After more discussions about scope, and understanding what we could achieve with the tech stack currently available, we realized that:
- We can’t improve the accuracy now, but we can reduce extraction times;
- According to our high-level estimations, there’s no constraints to stop the team from redesigning new upload flows;
- The team had the capacity to do most of the extra improvements that were negotiated between Design, Product and Engineering;
- It isn’t possible to do integrations with all of our Integrity Products, but we can find ways to connect all the pieces!
New Upload Journey
Our previous two-step upload flow was the initial source of issues. We smoothed out the experience by adding a new step, and adding ways to assist users to correct mistakes and maintain batch integrity, while keeping clear expectations:
Three-Step Upload Flow
With a step between adding Papers and commiting them to an upload, users can now add more files to a batch before confirming the upload process, or delete them.
Duplicate Detection
To uphold integrity and ensure no repeated research gets published, we created a duplicate detection system, that tells the user how many duplicates will be barred from making it into the upload.
Feedback, Feedback
We decided to strongly hold our users hand through each step of the flow: setting expectations of what will happen once they upload a batch of Papers right in the first step, and focusing on the specifics throughout the flow.
Integrity Connections
We started with minimal, but effective Integrity integrations: my focus was to make the essentials of the Integrity experience complement the journey that users go through in Proceedings Manager.
Integrity Overview
Users can check how many Integrity issues are in a volume of uploaded Papers through an overview that provides direction and access to power searches and Integrity dashboards.
Report Access
Integrity Reports, with highlighted issues, are generated for each uploaded Paper: users can consume these reports on a macro level, through Paper dashboards, or on a micro level, while analyzing each individual Paper.
Faster Metadata Extraction
After restructuring the service, our metadata extraction achieved remarkable results: When uploading 500 Papers, the extraction time was reduced from 30 minutes to 4 hours to an average of just 1-2 minutes.
The service, though fast, lacked the necessary accuracy... requiring manual cleanups by our Customer Service (CS) team. I needed to provide a time buffer to pause user activity while CS performed these cleanups, aiming to balance the situation with flexibility and care.
Clear Expectations
I used empty states and email notifications to inform users about cleanup wait times and next steps. When a cleanup is completed, CS triggers an email to let Organizers know they can resume their tasks in Proceedings Manager.
Missing Data Feedback
When facing extraction mishaps, Users can identify where to add missing data in dashboards or in individual Paper views, or through contextual tooltip interactions.
Ensuring Flexibility
We support CS-enhanced cleanups on which we communicate via email, and I added guidance like in-app notifications and progress indicators for Organizers that perform manual cleanups themselves.
The Second Iteration
While completing these additions, we learned from sales conversations that customers value integrity in Proceedings Manager but emphasize the need for product flexibility and easy configuration.
We needed to understand what it means to be configurable. With revenue as our driving point, we prioritized continuous iterations rather than validating the first iteration. Looking at client feedback through integrity and optimization optics with my Product Manager, we understood how the potential to raise product attractiveness lied behind two statements:
- “As a Publisher, I want to decide which parts of the workflow my teams can use, editing and creating my own flow”
- “As a Publisher, I want to define when Integrity Results become available to my team members”
Team limitations narrowed the scope: we had no time do this in a self-service way in Q1 2024. But, through configuration work, it was possible for Design to…
Streamline The PM Flow
Clients can define their workflow by choosing which steps to include or exclude. The example below illustrates how Proceedings Manager can undertake many features, or forfeit some features for a streamlined group of features such as bulk upload, integrity results, metadata extraction, and handover to the publisher.
The UI is inspired by Lego blocks – adding, removing, and rearranging components easily with a predictable, limited set of blocks, making the UI scalable within the defined layout, so all information is adequately displayed.
Phase Integrity Results
Publishers have varying workflows and methods for collecting, verifying, and publishing research. To maintain the integrity of this process, they need to control when integrity reports are disclosed. If Publishers allowed Organizers unlimited access to integrity results, it could raise early awareness to fix issues before publication – but could also enable bad actors, such as Organizers who force authors to cite their own works, to manipulate these reports and compromise research integrity.
Since Publishers own these reports, our team made configurations so that they can choose the appropriate timing to share them with their teams, on which I followed up by defining what to show across three different phases:
- When any Paper is sent to Proceedings Manager…Publishers release Integrity Data to Organizers at any time (default option);
- When a Paper is sent for Peer Review…Publishers release Integrity Results to Reviewers only, to expedite their work;
- After Handing a Volume of Research to a Publisher…Publishers release Integrity Data to Organizers only after these handover Research to them – a point when Organizers cannot edit any Research metadata.
Conclusion
The optimization of Proceedings Manager now allows users to safely process their research, with strong guidance and with integrity at the heart of the matter. By cleaning up issues left from its MVP days, users can define their own PM experience and adapt it to their specific needs. By allowing for granular controls, we empower Publishers to take the right publishing decisions so as to protect their revenue.
At the time of writing, a new customer is onboarding with a PM flow which they configured… which means I’ll be on the lookout for any valuable insights that need prioritization. A Product is never completely finished, so they say…
Impact
-4hrs
Task Time Reduction from 4 hours to an avg of 1-2 min
1
New Enterprise Customer Signature
3
New Enterprise Prospects in Pipeline
Next Steps?
For a third iteration, I'd like to create an Analytics tab inside Proceedings Manager: sourcing the data from an Integrity Manager API allows us to transpose it in an adequate space to consume it in PM, reducing friction and keeping the experience contained inside the same Product. These analytics would be paired with exclusive PM ones, so as to increase Product value.
Team Shoutout
A big big thank you to Constanza Rosenfeld (Linkedin) for reviewing this case study, for being the most supportive and insightful Design Manager one could have, and for your friendship!
A designer that works with a team that has Eri Giannaka (Linkedin), Júlio Piva (Linkedin), Afaq Khan (Linkedin), Vinay Pandya (Linkedin) and Ruwan Geeganage (Linkedin) in it, is, no doubt, in wonderful company: thank you for your feedback, for the brilliance you brought to this work, and for making private Slack channels a riot!