Managing content requests was time-consuming and risky. After an intranet redesign, a content strategy evaluation was conducted, and a better governance system was necessary. It was clear to us that automating workflows would better meet publishers’ and authors’ needs.

Automate a risky workflow for global intranet

UX design work products for story telling to sell the problem to leadership.
My Role

UX Designer

My Contribution
  • Conducted user discovery research with power users.
  • Mapped user flow, service blueprint and workflow.
  • Built a prototype and conducted user acceptance testing.
Other Collaborators
Challenge

Develop empathy for the content manager (user) so that I could communicate the impacts of the project to get stakehoder buy-in.

Use design for storytelling to get buy-in for a problem pitch

Applying observation and light inquiry to gather preliminary data about current state

Delivering results from discovery

Challenge

Create understanding among many different product owners about the source of problems, pains and impacts.

Priority matrix exercise for ranking complex conflicting enterprise customer needs.

Define business needs and design feasibility

I leveraged expert knowledge share, data analysis and stakeholder interview to understand and communicate priorities.

Insights

Discovery & Research Learnings

Team faces steep learning curve

Lack of training and knowledge transfer​

It must be easy to repeat the workflow, and standards and requirements must be referenced.

Team structure poses risk to business goals

Content publisher is missing requests

The workflow requires a system to reduce risk and resolve consistency issues.

Governance and knowledge share was a gap​

Current system was poorly understood. I developed a framework to clear up the current system impacts the user experience.

Poor user experience​

Content publisher hates redundant and tedious content policing task​

Missed opportunity 
to build a content archive to understand performance. The archive could also help with training content authors on what good looks like.

Design

Based on learnings, I created problem statements to communicate a MVP and a hypotheses to test prototypes.

From research findings into design

Problem Statements

As an intranet manager:

"I need to complete publishing requests for the intranet but the publish workflow is poor."

As a content author:

"I need to publish my content on the intranet but the publish workflow is poor."

Next steps

Following the research project I designed and delivered the UI and interaction design phase.

Outcomes

Translate research and observations into user insights and design direction. Following the discovery phase I was able to lead a UI and interaction design project with emphasis on technical feasibility and design intent for the user. 

Inspired leadership

IT partnered with Digital Communications on this project as part of the intranet redesign initiative. My findings were presented to both the CIO and the VP of Communications, where it received approval and positive energy. The research was included as a key deliverable for the 2021 Intranet Redesign.

Project Brief (Executive Summary)

Clear vision of the win

Work products translate research outcomes into design direction for the work to collaborate to produce and deliver. By conducting user research, we can save money and time, as well as communicate clear direction to a multifunctional team.

MVP
Screenflow

Business case

I delivered a concise business case to my manager, the director of digital communications. Identified key limitations of our current publishing workflow and I presented a plan for improving. 

Technical Requirement
Work team
Delivery Requirements

In my managers reply I learned of some challenges to my project: I would not be afforded any budget; I would need to find my own internal shared resources to collaborate as a working team; IT required that I use tools that were part of the O365 Microsoft Suite.

Documented knowledge share

Improved Service Blueprint
Before After