Venn Consulting Project

Venn Consulting Office 365 Intranet
Adam Krueger & Chris Poteet

© 2011 All rights reserved. www.portalsolutions.net 2
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tracing Our Solutions
Business
Objectives
Research
Findings
(User Needs)
Analyze Solutions
Reduce
Collaboration
Barriers
Need
Centralized
Location for
Collaboration
Goal, Barrier,
Task; High
Priority
Centralized
Project
Workspaces
Examples
Improve On-
Boarding
Efficiency
Need Up-to-
Date
Information
Goal, Barrier,
Task; Medium
Priority
Create On-
Boarding
Solution

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

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.

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/ve
nnconsultingopencardsort

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.

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.

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.

Design Comps & Style Guide
» See further examples in the related
documentation.

Venn Consulting Project

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