Client:
As the lead design contractor, I worked directly with non-tech executives for AARP to interview users & research design patterns to propose a redesign for their nationwide intranet, delivering cohesive wireframes for implementation as part of their Phase 0 efforts.
I lead UX research interviews and demos and provide templates for the development team to streamline processes from various departments and promote interface adoption.
We reviewed the system documentation of how the software is "supposed" to be used in preparation of our user experience interviews to find out how key employees are actually using it.
I led & conducted various initial user experience interviews with various department heads and power users, as identified by the client, to get an understanding of how they were interacting with the current software, as is.
After gathering feedback from the interviews, I created journey maps, segmented by departments and looked for current patterns. From here, we identified the "low-hanging fruit" that the client could relay to her team and demonstrate immediate progress to her superiors while we mapped out the long-term effort to design their cloud intranet.
We mapped out the previous sitemap structure to understand the reasoning behind the segmentation of their digital assets.
I conducted "Crazy 8s" sketch exercises with the client to, 1: ideate layouts for the several pages we needed to design, but more importantly, 2: invite the client to participate in the creative process to feel heard, seen, and an active collaborator to build trust.
Based on the manual exercises, we moved into the first level of lo-fi wireframing, where we understood the type of content we wanted to publish without worrying about the actual content, as it would all be dynamic for each user and department.
Fidelity is increasing, and we're making cuts. These steps for regular check-ins are important to get stakeholder buy-in and approval before heavy development is ever started.
We're still going through layout design rounds, but we are now adding corporate colors as a hierarchical tool to distinguish between departments without losing the feeling that they're still within the AARP ecosystem.
A final set of templates was delivered to the development team for implementation.
