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Problem
At the time of this project, we were part of a product team of engineers, designers, PMs, collaborating across different countries and reporting to different levels of stakeholders with the need to have visibility into what each project so we would have opportunities to align and leverage each other's work.
The user
In the process of collecting as much information as possible about our users, I looked into their demographics: age, gender, and region. Also, general traits about their occupation, interests, and hobbies. Lastly, I delve into their phycological traits such as user needs, motivations, and aspirations. Here's a snapshot of those findings:
Research
The most interesting approach of depicting the personas for this project was to select three archetypes who represented how members of the team consumed information. Newbie Nancy was the member fo the team that just joined the company and was looking specific information about her area and broad information about the company. Jumper Jay and Wizard Wendy had more time of company and different ways of approaching it. I conducted user interviews to understand the user's mental model and needs.
The process
I broke the project deliverables into small manageable chunks which marked the user interface deliverables for development and times where I got together with the stakeholders for design approval. Notice from this initial project planning, I reserved time for user feedback after engineers have implemented it and few stakeholders "get-together" in between.
In reality what ended up happening was something like this. Much more stakeholder input throughout the process. As a result, the timeline got pushed a bit more on each milestone.
Principles
The principles I used to guide the information architecture and achieve a pleasurable experience was to link the development of each layer of UI to Aaron Walter's "Hierarchy of user needs" theory of users delight. Creating a happy path and ask those question along the way helped to be focused on this goal.
Solution
Based on some hypothesis about our users, I created the visual design language, wireframes of the site, and later high fidelity prototypes. Assuming that having a website with projects, employees work highlights and helpful links would be ideal to meet users that needed more in-depth information and a newsletter to meet other users who would prefer to consume the same content in a more condensed way.
Our persona profile helped to prioritize the most important information to the user and find the appropriate language and tone to suit them. The redlines helped to communicate with engineers and have more control over the designs.
Data
After three months of user traffic, we gathered a substantial amount of data. From the metrics used: type of devices used, time spent on each media, time spent on each video presented, and user monthly traffic we discovered that the site architecture was not accommodating what each one of our personas was trying to accomplish.
Redesign
Data and user research gave us a complete picture of how we wanted to approach our next design plan. We went back to the whiteboard and proposed a different IA with a clear goal in mind – entry points that would meet our users' mental modal. That way we could solve the problem of communication transparency and keep the team engaged and updated on the team's latest work.
At the end instead of having one big research, we had small chunks of user feedback. Making it easier to identify the areas we needed to work on.
Lessons learned
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Have users feedback early and often was the right approach to identify what wasn't working and quickly iterate on the designs.
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Combine data and user research we discovered that a site segmentation per user would be the best solution.
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Include content collaborator to help set content relevance.
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Projects lacked documentation was a pain point for users.
Saga
Design
