This is a showcase of a Designprocess I did for an Intranet Platform for a Pharma group defining User and Business Goals and bringing them together. I did this at my former employer UEBERBIT, former [di] digitale informationssysteme GmbH back in 2011.
The client asked for help developing a Intranet Tool which helps their employees not only to communicate among each other but serving different User Groups concerning efficiency in their daily workflows and tasks.The efficient workflows of the employees is a good example for a Business objective, the company was interested in. Time is money, so efficient work and satisfied and less frustrated employees = reduction of costs, Return of Investment.
Who are your users and which goals and needs do they have?
In a Kickoff Meeting we nailed down three Main User Groups we’d like to address.
New employees, who wants to get involved, Distribution People which often work in the field and lack communication to their indoor service peeps and finally managers and team leaders, which are mainly interested in information gathering how business is going.
In a Kickoff Meeting we nailed down three Main User Groups we’d like to address.
New employees, who wants to get involved, Distribution People which often work in the field and lack communication to their indoor service peeps and finally managers and team leaders, which are mainly interested in information gathering how business is going.
The basic questions as we started were:
- How could new employees getting started within the company, what are their goals and fears?
- How could distribution/sales force people be motivated to use the tool?
- What are the goals for managers and team leaders, how would they take advantage of the tool?
So we began to define the user goals, based on questions we asked in the kickoff meeting, and some basic research in forums all over the web. Nevertheless the User Goals were based partly on assumptions not on ‘real’ empiric User Data achieved with surveys or employee interviews. It’s important to keep that always in mind.
Storyboarding the UX: Scribbling User flows and generating new ideas through story like thinking
For the first round of Mockups we took the ‘Newbie’ Persona and began to scribble a basic workflow, which helped us in the ideation process.
We defined these stories for each of the user groups and scribbled quick & dirty flows and so we generated ideas through the story-like thinking and scribbling process, which is a fun way to do this. In addition, communicating the reasons why we should consider special functions to our client was much more easier because the questions were visualized and so descriptive and much more evident than handing over a text heavy paper.
