Vaillant – Social Intranet

Vaillant

Social Intranet

UX Research and Design for a social intranet project, with the goal to support collaboration, information exchange and a smart and seamless onboarding.

Role and team

Design Lead, Senoir UX Designer (me), Junior UX Designer, Product Owner, Client

Responsibilities

User Research, UX/UI Design, User Test Planning, Test Moderation

Timeline

4 Weeks

Deliveries

Empathy Maps, Personas, Scribbles, User Flows, Wireframes, Feature Map, UI Design, Prototype, Test Plan

Overview

The aim of the project was to understand the positive aspects and usage of the current Vaillant intranet and to develop a concept for a new state-of-the-art Social Intranet and test that with the focus groups.

Challenge

While the post-social-media age has already begun, intranets for knowledge management are on the rise. Vaillant already had an company intranet with a mainly top-down communication options and few collaboration and self-service options. The challenge also was to take two intranet development and cultural steps at once.

Goals

Project goals

Understand what are the popular intranet contents and features, that can be adopted to the new social intranet.
Understand how the current intranet hinders or promotes the workflow of individual user groups
Create a concept for a social intranet that promotes collaboration, networking and information exchange.
Design and develop a prototype of the new intranet.
Test the acceptance of the new social features by new and long-standing employees.

Business goals

More efficiency through simplified communication and the ability to easiliy find employees with skills.
Increased innovative power through more collaboration and knowledge exchange.
Lower service costs for employees through increased self-service capabilities

Design Process

1. Discover

Together with stakeholders, we identified all relevant user groups and defined the corresponding focus groups for futher research, based on the relevance of the intranet to their actual work.

We then interviewed representatives of the focus groups and collected individual user goals and formulated them as user stories. Empathy maps of the fokus groups were created to emathize with these.

2. Ideation

In the ideation phase, we collected improvements along the journey of a new employee and defined the main use cases.

The main Use Cases were designed in User flows and discussed within the team.

3. Define

Based on research and ideation, we collected the user statements from the feedback and organized them in an empathy map.

Emplyee peronas were modulated in the groups spectrum of new emplyees and long-term employees. The formulation of problem statements and a design hypothesis helps the team to sharpen the actual problem and the project scope:

Design Hypothesis

An employee can work efficiently if he or she finds the information that are needed, therefore a prominent designed and smart search is a valuable key functionality.
An employee is as valuable to the company as she or he is networked, therefore a smart search for people through skills and locations creates value.
The first days as a new employee are the key for long-term relationships, therefore the onboarding process has to be as simple and smart as possible.
The ability to easily to exchange ideas with others, react to others peoples posts, is an enabling function and therefore should be designed as easy and usable as possible.

4. Design & Test

In the ideation phase, we collected improvements along the journey of a new employee and defined the main use cases.

User flows were structuraly designed in mockups and discussed within the team. We decided to go with mockups that already sincluded the brand design, so that long-time emplyees didn`t get confused in the usability test.

A Figma protoytype was tested by the corresponding focus user groups.

Status Quo Analysis

We analyzed the current intranets structure, features, tools and content.

Who are the users?

User Groups and Segments

During a workshop with stakeholders, the user groups and corresponding segments were identified and visualised.

User Research

User Goals

Also the user groups goals, pains and requirements were collected and formulated as user stories and later developed as SMART goals, to ensure that the main user stories match with the business goals.

Empathize

Persona – Focus Group `New Employee´

The user stories were also translated in empathie maps for each corresponding user group . In this one it does show the ´New Employee´ Persona that is not only new to the intranet, but also new in the company and needs to go through an initial onboarding process.

Ideation

Employee Journey Mapping

In a second workshop, we ideated the best employee experience „like in an ideal world“ and collected improvements allong the employee journey, matching them with the features of a state of the art social intranet.

Define

Feature Scope

Through user research and an analysis of the current intranet, a scope for the project was collected in a Feature Map from the required features of a status quo social intranet and the popular features of the current intranet and structured into epics, features and functions.

Design

The users goals were analyzed as task flows, designed as wireflows and prototyped as optimized in user flows. We discussed the design results within the team in iterations and the client before the prototype was tested with Vaillant employees.

Wireflow

Prototype Keyscreens

User Test

Test Plan

Test duration: 50 minutes
Participants: 8 (3 Office employees, 3 New Employees, 2 Corporate Communicators)
Test method: Remotely in-person