UX Design process

Customer research and personas drove the entire process:

• User story creation / prioritization

• Content research

• Iterative UX design process

Customer Research

The project began with a contextual inquiry project to observe customers

• Engaged stakeholders (product, editorial, sales) as collaborators in research

• Stakeholders served as observers/note-takers for every observation session

• Analyzed data and created persona skeletons in a 2-day stakeholder workshop

• Final personas created using the skeletons from the workshop

Stakeholder engagement in the process ensured widespread socialization, acceptance and use of the personas

Content Research

Content Set

For each practice, area we held a series of co-creation groups with customers

• Customer participants worked individually, in pairs and as a group (divergent/convergent thinking)

• Created ideal content set

• Established hierarchy of importance for content

• Documented relationships among types of content

Taxonomy

For each practice area we did a series of three card sorts with customers: open, closed and modified Delphi

1. Open card sort – customers organized and labeled topics

2. Closed card sort – customers navigated the taxonomy to find topics based on scenarios

3. Modified Delphi technique:

   • Revised taxonomy based on open/closed card sorting

   • Individually, customers reviewed and modified taxonomy (post-its on a wall)

   • Documented the revised taxonomy, and then next participant edited the previous customer’s organization

   • Created the final taxonomy based on the findings from all 3 methodologies

User Experience Design

Designed in collaboration with customers to support / streamline their work

• Iterative design process: design, test, revise, retest

• Validated design decisions

• Pivoted design based on findings