Interconnecting departments

Designing an internal system that optimises company operations and procedures.

Where my help comes in

The company is currently using many 3rd party services for different department processes, those tools are expensive and most of the time they work in information silos, where no interconnectivity is possible.

The assignment was to work as a consultant for an internal innitiative they had started a year back.

They had been developing this new tool connected to different systems to offer a unified space for different departments to interact.

The goal

Due to the fact that the current tool they were building was created by one single back-end developer, there were many areas that could be improved with a designer in the team.

First I decided to explore the current functional flow and sitemap to see any inconsistencies, loopholes, or usability issues.

Thanks to this document we were able to see fails in the system, sections too hidden for the users to access easily and structural iconsistencies.

Structuring data and information architecture design

Another main issue is that the company was using 3 different sources of information about employees, coming from different departments, like HR or IT.

So understanding what information was stored in each system was very important to structure it and presenting it to users.

This also helped us to discover duplications, outdated or unnecessary information.

Defining user journeys

With some many different departments and employee roles, we decided to create the most relevant journeys from different role-based personas.

Each journey was marked with different key points and indicated potential pain/gains or opportunities.

Prototyping ideas

As a one-man team I’ve learned that the most effective way to save some time and budget in a small project is to start with a base of design components that are simple enough to maintain but visually-appealing enough in order to get work through the different stakeholder levels.

This helped to extend the budget of the project, and convince the right people to invest and support the iniciative.

Short but exciting project

Due to the nature of the project, my job as an external consultant came to an end, I delivered many UX documentation and screen based UI designs that will help them to keep designing and building this tool internally.