Venn Consulting Project

Venn Consulting Office 365 Intranet

Adam Krueger & Chris Poteet

© 2011 All rights reserved. www.portalsolutions.net

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Background

» Venn Consulting is a 70 person company (1o of them contractors) located in Washington D.C.

» Venn specializes in assisting agencies seeking to acquire and maintain ISO compliance through their processes.

» Their average project size is ~$65k.» Their core team for this project includes

their CIO, their KM lead, a project manager, and head of IT services.


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Business Objectives Workshop

» The goal in this exercise is to establish, with the stakeholders, what the main, guiding goals and principles are from an organizational perspective.

» These objectives assist in framing the UX research scripts and sessions.

» The workshop takes between 1-1.5 hours.


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Business Objectives

» Reduce the barriers to effective digital collaboration focused on project execution and estimation.

» Provide a forum to communicate organizational news, needs, events, etc.

» Empower “self-services” including things like benefits management and IT support.

» Facilitate the introduction of a new technological platform that will eventually include Lync, Exchange, etc.

» Reduce employee on-boarding due to project turnover.


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Audience Definition Workshop

» First, PS needs to understand the types of people to cover during research and design.

» A 1.5 hour session is facilitated between a consultant and the stakeholder team.

» The stakeholder team comes to the meeting with “homework” provided by PS in the form of a blank XLS with instructions.

» During the meeting the audiences are refined.


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Create Interview Scripts

» Due to the scope of this envision, we will take some existing stock script questions and contextualize them based on our known business objectives.

» After creating the script, choose no more than two people from your audience and interview.– If you have lots of audiences, either seek to

merge audiences, or include other types of people in your interviews.


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Sample Interview Script

» An interview script is written to facilitate the conversation.

» Ask questions with a emphasis on understanding goals, barriers, tasks, motivations, priorities, habits, relationships, tools, and environment.

» Interview stakeholders first to allow them to be comfortable with the process and refine your script.

» Have enough questions to fill about an hour.


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Contextual Inquiry

» Even though the interview findings give us insight, they can’t give us a full picture of the breadth of how these employees work.

» We pick one person from our sales team and another from our project delivery team to “shadow” in a contextual inquiry session.

» We choose Mary who is a project manager for the ISO projects, and we also decide to shadow James a brand new employee.– We want to see more in practice of how Mary

handles the day-to-day of project collaboration.– James will give us insight into self-service needs and

company communication.


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Contextual Inquiry Findings

» Mary– We see that Mary’s “work domain” encompasses several

different locations due to working with other team members. This makes work consistency difficult.

– Mary has filled her desktop with shortcuts to documents on file shares. She also has a post-it note on her monitor with important links.

– Obtaining sign off for project deliverables is an extremely manual process.

» James– James was given a folder with a list of on-boarding tasks.

He was told by other employees to ignore it since it’s old, and he was just emailed by another employee all the docs he needs.

– He was unable to locate any of the necessary HR forms to enroll in his benefits.


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Interview Findings

» Document duplication has become a problem—both in file share folders and e-mailing. No “single source of truth.”

» Inability to manage company records, forms, templates effectively.

» Traversing the file share hierarchy is painful and almost impossible.

» Managing permissions on folders is difficult.


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Interview Findings

» The ability to search is not robust enough.

» Receiving information about the company’s initiatives, plans, etc. is only found in mass emails which get lost easily.

» Also interested down the road of redoing the public website and possibly using SharePoint to do so.


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Research Findings Presentation

» After completing all our research we compiled all the data.

» Then we organized into categories such as goals, barriers, tasks, etc.

» From there we prioritized all of our findings and generated a presentation organized by high-level theme to share our findings.


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Usage Scenarios

» Usage scenarios are one way to demonstrate that we understand the needs of the organization through research and analysis.

» Other options include use cases, scenarios, user stories, etc.

» The scenarios are matched with an audience, business objective, and given a UX description.


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Tracing Our SolutionsBusiness

Objectives

Research

Findings (User Needs)

Analyze

Solution

sReduce Collaboration Barrier

s

Need Centralized Location

for Collaborat

ion

Goal, Barrier, Task; High

Priority

Centralized

Project Worksp

aces

Examples

Improve On-

Boarding

Efficiency

Need Up-to-Date

Information

Goal, Barrier, Task;

Medium Priority

Create On-

Boarding

Solution


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Tracing Our Solutions

» Another example that shows necessary relationship between user research and obj.– Hopefully contextual inquiry


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Content Audit

» Before starting to build the Venn intranet, we need to understand the amount of and kind of content that currently exists.

» We also need to know, from what we can, future information needs.

» It is a intense, time-consuming, tedious, but very important process.

» Venn Consulting has the bulk of their information stored on file shares, and that is reflected in our audit spreadsheet.


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Card Sort

» Card sorting allows us to understand how users think about information and how it should be categorized.

» We will organize an open card sort to determine labels for our navigational schemes and how to group them.– These “cards” come from our user research and content

audit.– They should be validated with the team before doing the

test.

» Using a tool like Optimal Workshop allows us to test many users quickly, and it gives us tools for analysis.– https://portalsolutions.optimalworkshop.com/optimalsort/

vennconsultingopencardsort


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Sample Labels/Sitemap

» After doing our card sort analysis, we can present the Venn team our suggested hierarchy and labels for their navigation.

» This helps validate our direction, allows us to do usability testing, and will shape any CMS-specific information architecture.


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Wireframes

» A user interface inventory helps the process of UI design. It involves surveying existing interfaces and noticing trends and opportunities.

» Armed with a UI and content audit we can start to make decisions on the user interface.

» Using all of our research we can make intelligent decisions about our interfaces.– Page layout strategy gives them insight into our

thought process.– Home page wireframe can provide easy entry into

employee resources, company news, and project sites.

– Project sites provide a centralized place for all delivery collaboration.


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Usability Testing

» Usability testing is the best way to ensure that our design decisions are meeting business and user needs.

» There are many types of usability testing, due to short Venn engagement, we will do a Treejack test to ensure our navigation works.

» We could also do more full-scale, moderated usability testing to do further validation on the user interface.


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Design Comps & Style Guide

» See further examples in the related documentation.