Building a strategic research plan
I worked with the BA (Leena Lakhani), Project Manager (JJ Van As) as well as the Brand Intranet Managers to identify key user role types within each of their business groups.
This emphasised those that were likely to engage with the intranet and rely on the information it provided.
I created a plan whereby I would engage with users on-site at offices around the UK (typically spending 2 – 3 days in each office).
I would then return to the home office, to review, analyse findings and prepare for the next field study.
The review and analysis steps included:
- provisional analysis of the findings on key tasks
- evidence building of witnessed behaviours
- hypothesis building of potential design directions
The preparation steps included:
- make any adjustments about the type of engagement I would conduct next
- adjust the methods used, where relevant
- focus in on new areas of enquiry
This would be conducted before heading out to the next office and engaging with the next set of users.
Additionally, I gave initial indicators of interesting discoveries to the wider project team. This gave them the sight of the value that the research would bring to the project.
Discovery
User Research Preparation
I also conducted a content audit of the current intranet content to identify all the existing content types.
This served several purposes:
- I needed to understand the scope of the existing content to select representative content for inclusion in card sorts.
- The content of the intranet was vast and so a card sort on all content was not practical. Through careful analysis, I selected representative elements to include within card sort decks.
- I was able to gather a full picture about the scale of the content that had built up over time (in an ungoverned manner). This proved essential as I was also a significant contributor to a workstream covering future governance of the intranet.
- Future policies needed to be created in order to minimise the build up of irrelevant and sometimes misleading content.
- I required a detailed understanding of all the content types for the external technology development partner that we worked with.
User Research – Card Sorting
To inform the Information Architecture of the new sites, I conducted card sorts with representative users across all the UK sites.
This was weighted based on:
- the numbers of users each type represented
- the relative level of engagement in terms of
- frequency and criticality that the content held for the user type.
I initially conducted open (in person) cards sorts, sometimes with single users, and sometimes with groups of 3.
I incorporated group card sorts sessions to understand:
- reasonable alternatives for groupings
- a wider set of keywords that they might associate with the content
This was achieved by asking users to engage in think aloud protocols. Users, in debating alternatives often provided this information.
I took the findings from card sort sessions and ran affinity analysis on the groupings. I reviewed the vocabulary and determined provisional grouping patterns.
Certain content began to be clearly grouped. Other content was brought into replace this content within the card sorts. This sat alongside cards that required further analysis, those that did not have clear patterns of how it was grouped.
In total, I did dozens of card sorts across the user bases. I took a bottom-up approach to the information architecture design. As one level of the architecture became clearer I moved up the potential architecture. I did further card sorts with cards that formed the grouped titles from the original card sorts. Each card sort was focused (with critical content for the group I was engaging) and generic content that applied to all.
I recorded sessions (with the permission of the participants) to ensure think-aloud ideas were captured. In this way, the card sorting was both quantitative and qualitative in nature.
User Research – International Scope
To ensure that the research covered all aspects of the business and user needs, I worked with the Brand Intranet Managers. They were each responsible for their own parts of the overall business.
I did this to determine how I could best engage with their users to balance appropriately across their intranet user base.
In addition, I liaised with colleagues in the US to ensure that equivalent research was conducted with offices in North America.
Setting this up involved a series of conference calls where I outlined my detailed plans.
This covered my own plans for on-site research sessions. I shared all the relevant materials (interview scripts, cards (for cards sorts)).
I followed up with explanations and learnings I had gathered in terms of techniques that had worked well. This enabled them to benefit from the procedural learnings from the sessions.
Avoiding tainting or bias
I was very careful about what I shared in terms of user insights. This was to minimise any bias they may establish before starting their research.
Discovery – In summary
I created a plan for engaging users:
- across different parts of the business
- in many roles
- across many offices in the UK – from call Centres in Cardiff to Power stations near Grimsby.
My main research activities involved:
- Interviewing users about their roles
- Conducted task analysis on the tasks they did –
- this covered how they used, and potentially could use the intranet to support the completion of those tasks.
From here I built up:
- priority tasks lists of what was important to users
- what information was important to them
- what format would it be best presented in
Discovery – Analysis
I analysed the results of the card sort with extensive affinity analyses. I created physical representations of the proposed information architecture. Content and groupings were represented by post-it notes of different colours and sizes.
The content was cross-referenced against the analysis of the value of content. This came from the numerous user interviews and task analysis sessions I ran.
The architecture underwent many refinements and remained pinned to walls for weeks. I worked through the revisions required for each of the twenty-four business units.
I created a list of critical and important areas to include (as central features or optional areas) within pages. Which in turn provided guidance about the structure and features that would need to be included in the required page templates.
This research phase provided a huge amount of intelligence to inform the next phase of the work.
Next: Design phase