TERA
Crafting the TERA Engagement Hub & Communication Channels // April 2020 - Oct 2021
For privacy purposes, the client’s name, logos, and some content have been removed or altered.
The Challenge
The TERA program needed a channel of communication to easily reach our end users so that we could keep them up-to-date and informed on the changes that were going to take place over the next 3 years. We also needed a place to house our internal program documents and content, externally-facing trainings and communications, and a feedback mechanism. Our time constraint in building the hub was approximately 3 weeks with a team of 5.
The Team
Myself and 4 Change management leads from Sales, Supply Chain, Finance and IT
My Roles
Team Lead, Branding, UX Design & Consulting, Development, Change Management, Communications
Tools
G-suite, O365 (PowerPoint, Word, SharePoint)
The Design Process
Context
About TERA
TERA (Transforming Enterprise Reporting & Analytics) is a business intelligence and analytics transformation program whose purpose is to lay a foundation for better business decision making by unearthing actionable insights to support its people. It is aimed at creating a unified, advanced analytics solution for reporting data. The program initially spans across functions including Sales, Finance, Customer Support & Services, Supply Chain, and IT.
Situation & Constraints
The TERA Engagement Hub was meant to be the one-stop-shop for all TERA and TERA-related BI organizational information. Along with the building of the Hub, the program and other programs under the BI umbrella needed branding. The Hub needed to be completed in under a month, and from there would need to be constantly updated for the duration of the 3-year program. Branding would first need to be established for TERA, and then subsequently for the other BI organizations once time allowed.
Discover
Interviews & Personas
User interviews had already been conducted prior to my joining the TERA program, and I came in while personas were being curated. These personas would not only be users of the TERA Hub, but end users for the program as a whole. While I do not have that information to share, we had ended up with 9 different users that ranged from Product Owner Pete, our typical product owner in a more managerial position, to Super-User Sally, a tech-savvy and heavy user of business intelligence data.
Competitive Analysis
Keeping in mind what we learned from our end users, we moved into a competitive analysis to see what kinds of information other program engagement hubs at the client housed. This included looking at different intranets and outward communication websites, taking note of repeating features and information architecture, and speaking to people involved in related BI programs. Our main goals were to capture which features would be the most important to have in our own engagement hub, and figure out how to display that those features and information in way that would be easy and intuitive for users to access.
Card Sorting
After narrowing down the features and information to be hosted on the hub, we began to work on determining the information architecture. Essentially, asking the question: How can we structure our hub in a way that is intuitive?
We performed a card sorting exercise with participants each user group in order to learn about how they would naturally organize the given information into groups. With our constraints, we were able to perform the exercise with 3 participants each from the end user and internal program team groups, and 2 from the managers. The results of the exercise paired with our findings informed how we would organize our hub.
Define
The Audience
There were three main user groups that we needed to target for this engagement hub: program end-users, the internal TERA program team, and leadership & managers. In order to better understand what all our users would need out of the hub, we reached out to people from each group for a quick discussion, asking the some of following questions to come up with a rough list of needs:
The Problem
Our Hub needed to solve for the needs of all these audience groups. Specifically, it needed to house information pertaining to:
The overall TERA program, including timelines, contacts, and general information
Specific products within TERA, including training and necessary onboarding files
The overall internal BI Transformation, for end users
Templates and branding, or other things managers could use to cascade to their teams.
Feedback mechanism to understand end user sentiment
Design
Prototyping
Prototyping the hub was ended up following a different process than usual. Rather than going from paper prototypes and working our way slowly upwards, we began with a quick white boarding session amongst our team, from which I immediately began to build our website. The client was a heavy user of Microsoft O365, with SharePoint being their main platform for file sharing collaborative work. During our competitive analysis step, I had taken the time in parallel to research which platforms might be suitable for hosting our hub. Many of the existing program websites has been built and coded from scratch, but after looking into SharePoint Sites had to offer, it seemed more and more likely to meet the our needs the farther down the process we went.
Develop
The Engagement Hub
Because SharePoint Sites already has an intuitive interface for inserting and manipulating elements, creating our prototype directly on the final platform proved to be the most straightforward solution for both efficiency and time constraints. I took charge of building the website out myself, fleshing out the site hierarchy and creating placeholders for every page, block of information, image, graphic, and backend folder structure. In the end, we had a working, clickable website with dummy links and fake content, ready for user testing.
Branded Templates & Assets
A large part of the overall development was created branded assets and templates to use throughout the program. The visual design of TERA was a project in itself, separate from creating the hub. To read more about that process, check it out below!
Content Curation
Content curation was definitely a challenge, because keeping the Hub populated with up-to-date information required reaching out to product owners, managers, and other team members across functions on a weekly basis. The recurring program updates included:
Weekly TERA update, emailed to entire program
TERA monthly newsletter, emailed to entire program and updated on the Hub
Weekly program file updates on Hun
Timeline updates on Hub
Weekly spotlight for specific products
Instructional videos on updated products
In addition to program information, the hub also needed to be updated with information about other programs under the greater BI organization in order keep a sense of consistency.
Iterate
User Testing
We began our testing quickly, scheduling meetings with our different user groups to perform usability tests. We ran through several different scenarios and tasks with each participant, asking questions such as:
How would you find information related to product X from the home page?
If you wanted to contact someone related to Y, how would you do it?
Which products are going to be included in the next sprint, and when does that begin?
We observed as they performed their tasks, asked questions as to why they chose certain paths, and gathered their overall opinions at the end of each session. The beauty of using the SharePoint Sites as our platform was that it allowed for multiple users at once, so we could all test at the same time and then come together to share our findings and iterate.
Collecting feedback and making changes was very simple; it was just a matter of tweaking what we needed to and republishing. This allowed for reversible changes, and discussions with our users after observing them perform their tasks gave us insights as to why a change might be effective and help others similar to that user. All the while, other member of the team began populating the site with real content; testing, iterating, and content creation happened in parallel, allowing us to pivot quickly and speed up our process towards creating a final product.
Launch & Rollout
Once the entire website was populated with the proper content, we took our website to leadership for approval before performing a small-batch launch to the current product team. With several products scheduled for development over the course of the first year, the product team at the time numbered approximately 30. With this small batch launch, we were able to collect even more data feedback to streamline the hub further.
Happy with the outcome, leadership approved the extended launch of the TERA Engagement Hub, to be announced in the TERA newsletter to all our entire stakeholder group of over 1,000. Site visitors would be able to leave feedback on the website as they wanted, as well as through quarterly surveys and replies to the monthly TERA newsletter. As more products began to run in parallel, that stakeholder group increased by thousands, and within months the TERA Hub had reached outside the program and news had bled to the entire BI organization.
Applying the Framework
With my name plastered all over the TERA Engagement Hub, I was contacted by several different internal BI programs and organizations shortly after requesting help for me to build or update their own engagement hubs. I created a process for them to follow, and hosted trainings on how to build the sites and secure permissions. By the of my time on the TERA program, I had built out a new portal for the entire BI organization, as well as initiated builds for three other program portals to be handed off in a similar fashion.
Final Thoughts
The Overall Experience
Because of the duration of the program, there were so many opportunities to learn and pivot. Building the hub was truly an iterative process, especially as the program grew and more products were added. With new team members constantly being interchanged, I was often introduced to new ideas and perspectives, which allowed our Hub to become even better and more comprehensive over time. I truly realized the value of our impact when I was approached by those other organizations to help with their own internal hubs.
Personal Growth
Overall, TERA was an amazing experience for me in terms of personal growth. Having to fully take charge and lead this task, managing a team of people who were all senior to me was initially daunting, but I feel that I came out of this experience with a world’s difference in confidence. I learned so much about organization, communication, thinking critically and creatively, and most of all the importance of my own opinion and speaking up.