The Institute of Physics of USP is the oldest and largest institution of research and teaching of Physics in Brazil. It comes from the Departments of Physics of the Polytechnic School and the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters, meeting in the Institute from 1970. The Institute has in its staff more than 225 researchers, in addition to about 400 postgraduate students and 1,200 with more than 300 employees in their cadres. From a didactic point of view, the Institute of Physics maintains a laboratory for about three thousand USP students, in the areas of engineering, exact sciences and biology, and more scientific expositions for primary and secondary students and the general public.
The challenge: when the Umcomum was sought by IFUSP, the demand that was presented was to rethink the institute's access to information portal. Because it contains a lot of information, serving very different audiences, and providing work tools for the internal departments, the excess of functionality and content required a large amount of time to reach the end of each user's journey. In addition, since many of the institute's professors and employees are good programmers, several informal appendices to the platform were created, which made it difficult to recognize a unit of visual language and navigation.
DIAGNOSIS
The Umcomum defined in briefings, together with IFUSP, that the starting point of the project would be an immersion with the various stakeholders that use the portal to understand and map the various functionalities, forms of use and information that its users seek and designing their journeys within the portal. With this it would be possible to place the design at the service of the project's stakeholders, going on the field and putting the users in focus, making them the protagonist and collaborator of the process, from beginning to end. Thus, Umcomum had two main objectives: to map the use and need of the public involved and to propose information architecture solutions for the new portal to be conceived.
In the mapping, Institute employees, teachers and students were defined as the main public of the portal, with which they developed group workshops and in-depth interviews to understand points such as the types of content and features most accessed - as well as the unused ones - and as these publics imagined the ideal portal, taking advantage of external references and the power of collaborative creation to devise new structures for the portal.
There were more than 20 individual and collective interviews with employees, students and teachers, as well as 3 workshops with representatives of these same groups. The concern was to consider, at this stage of contextualization, the maximum possible users so that the posterior analysis was well represented and grounded.
The systematization of the data collected in the first stage, shared with the project management team, enabled a macro understanding of a problem that involved different public profiles and objectives that each had when using the portal. It was possible to understand and delve more deeply into the perceptions, needs and desires of the users, as well as to understand where there were synergies and divergences regarding the use of the portal. This work preceded the generation of ideas and aims to give subsidies so that the next generative step could be made based on well-informed information and a vision about the problem shared by all: the most difficult challenges were related to the internal organization of the institute and not to the technical part of the system behind the portal.
The group dynamics, separating students, teachers and employees, were moments of contextualization in which it was understood the journeys of the users of the portal as well as ideation for new structures and functionalities. In the case of the project for IFUSP, the stage of ideation was based on the design of several navigation possibilities, as well as proposals for dividing the contents. From the simplest to the most daring, structures were designed with different user days, so that there could be several possibilities of solution, which will open the doors so that the experimentation phase is also rich in options.
