Client | Karsh Hagan
Year | Spring 2019 (On-going)
Type | UX/UI
Role | UX/UI
Find Your Purpose
During my internship at Karsh Hagan, I was given the opportunity to redesign their internal resource management site. The KH Resource Hub, formerly known as the Resource-asauras, is a file management site that allows KH employees find templates, forms, documents that help in their day-to-day.
**Due to Intellectual Property, I am unable to link/capture the live site.
The Problem
Increase employee engagement on the Karsh Hagan internal resource site by understanding the usage in the day-to-day lives of employees.
The Solution
The solution is to create an experience for KH employees that allows to quickly and with ease, access and download important resources. Additionally, employees can request and make updates to the site that gives ownership back to the agency to ensure that documents are up-to-date and accurate.
My Role
As the UX/UI designer, I owned most the project entirely from start to finish with my supervisor, Trevor Glassman, overseeing the project. I was responsible for a variety of UX tasks: conducting research through user interviews, created personas and user flows of the system, conducted user testing and developed an identity for the site based on the Karsh Hagan brand that was applied to the final KH Resource Site. The timeline for the project was 8 weeks and I successfully delivered all assets of the campaign to the client.
Research
To understand more on why there is lack of engagement on the resource site, we conducted the following research to get a better understanding of our users, their pain points, and the opportunities to enhance the experience.
Stakeholder Interviews
We talked with 10 stakeholders from each department at Karsh Hagan with various titles asking them questions from what does an average day looks like at KH to what kind information does one search for on the current resource site. With each interview running for 15-30 min, we were able to get a grasp about basics of the website. Although they were structured questions like (what does an average day look like at KH to what kind of information does one search for on the current resource site), the interviews allowed for flexibility to go off script to genuinely understand a user’s attitudes and behaviors. Deciding to speak with different departments and various experience levels allowed me to understand how different users perceive and utilize the site for their own goals.
From Account Coordinators to Managers to HR and Creative and Finance Directors.
Persona
Content Inventory
Through visualizing the current resource hub’s content flow on a spread sheet, we were able to understand the naming conventions, what kind of documents live on the site, and click paths that a user would take to a document. We found:
There is no consistency of categories on each department page. For example, in All Agency, lives categories like general, accounting, comms team while account services, media and production have categories like templates/forms, training, tools and creative has their own nomenclature.
There are no individual pages for the categories, only sections. This makes pages long and overwhelming, especially since links are displayed in a button format.
There are acronyms that live on the site that new hires do not understand. It is noticeable that there are a lot resources with jargon specific to the advertising industry which can be confusing to new employees when there is no description.
Card Sorting
Through the closed card sorting process, where we were able to utilize personas, user journey and user flows to sort the information architecture to reflect how our user would navigate the information on the site. We found that information fit under two categories:
Training Information
Daily Information
Training Information is
Daily Information is
Findings
Key Insights
Through research and interviews, we were able to pin point the following as the key insights to inform the design of the resource hub site:
Created a MVP | We removed all training and kept documents within resource hub to be categorized under forms, templates, decks and tools that help with daily tasks.
Search Capability | Include a search function so documents can be found quickly and seamless from any page.
Updated Documents | Documents are up-to-date and have the ability to request/submit document updates on the site.
Uniformed file structure | Create a file structure with hierarchy in order to reduce clutter and confusing click paths.
User Flow
Based on the insights above, we created a user flow of the proposed site to understand what necessary pages and components will need to be designed.
Design and Testing
Sketches
Initial Whiteboard Brainstorming Session
Navigation Wireframes
Navigation Mock Ups | Versions 1, 2, and 3
Low Fidelity Wireframes
User Testing
The method that we used in our testing was an open interview usability test where we had several users give our initial thoughts on the application, exploring the UI while giving feedback, and then were asked to perform a series of tasks (i.e. please go find the document Check Request and download or how would you submit an update request.)
When testing with our internal users, we found that the content cards where a user can either preview or download a document was confusing because most documents, due to their file types, have an inability to view on a browser. We decided to create cards that reflected the actions that a user was able to do: either directly download the document (i.e. Keynote, Exel, Word documents) or preview by linking out to a document (i.e. PDF, Google Doc) that could then be downloaded.
Document Card Feedback
During testing, we found that many users go to the site to download the same 3-5 documents. Many wanted a quick way to access those documents from the home page. In solving for the problem, most recent sections would live on the home site under the search bar for quick access to those most recent documents.
Most Recents Section
Final Design and Reflection
Final Design Implementation 1 | Home page
Reflection
Although the Resource Hub, fairly simple in terms of MVP features, it is the start to building an application that reflects internal users needs by being able to directly download documents that they use in their daily tasks. By being able to connect users to the documents most helpful to them faster, gets them back to the tasks that are most essential when working with clients, developing creative, or communicating their team member more successfully. By spending time understanding the user, the documents they use and narrowing down the content it becomes a more organized system that has the ability to grow to more user needs.