Research and information design projects

Working freelance with digital agency Sapient, Janet's role was as BA on a small team carrying out research for Vodafone's VGE division.

Vodafone was investigating ways to use an intranet to provide a knowledge managment solution for its sales and customer support team.

It was vital that the intranet design supported the sales life-cycle.

This was an extensive research project, involving interviews with over 40 Vodafone staff, plus requirements workshops. Working closely with the rest of the team, Janet designed and facilitated workshops, led analysis of requirements, and pulled information together to create 5 key personas, with associated user journeys.

Activities included:

• Carried out extensive interviews across the Vodafone multi-national team
• Face to face and telephone interviews including key stakeholders
• facilitated workshops to complete a workflow analysis
• facilitated workshops to document the sales lifecycle
• developed 5 key personas
• developed user journeys
• developed a requirements database with MoSCOW ratings

(Undertaken and managed by Sapient)

Peabody is a leading housing provider in London. They wanted to re-design their website to provide interactive services for tenants and home-owners, with a professional look and feel to promote the organisation.

As information architect, Janet played a central role in Peabody's team, driving out requirement detail, providing a new information structure and sitemap, together with wireframes and interaction flows for customer registration, rent account, online forms, a complaint process and property search.

Activities included:

• central role in team working with developers and stakeholders
• liaison with internal departments to ensure integration of processes such as HR and call centre
• information architecture and concepts
• sitemaps and circa 150 wireframes for Website
• interaction flows and page layouts
• usability trials with sample users
• iterative work with developers to ensure smooth interaction design
• work on the content inventory through to completion of new site
• hands-on use of Umbraco CMS templates to proof-read pages

Website sections redesigned:

• Registration and login
• News pages and archive
• Reporting repairs
• Complaint process with complaint forms online
• Property search pages
• CEO blog area
• Wide rangeof information content sections
• Job vacancy pages
• Tenants rent account and contact tracking

Site: www.peabody.org.uk

Peabody wanted to replace their intranet with a solution that enhanced sharing news and information among staff, and provided a one-stop shop to HR and other systems.

Janet guided the team through the design phase. This included gathering requirements from key stakeholders, facilitation and analysis of user card-sorting workshops, and reviews of best practise.

Through refinements with the team and stakeholders, Janet provided the information architecture for the intranet, sitemaps, wireframes and templates, with documentation for developers.

Activities included:

• analysis of requirements and research
• card sorting workshop with staff
• intranet site structure and concepts
• sitemap and wireframe templates for intranet
• page layouts for key areas
• liaising with internal departments to ensure integration of processes
• written documentation for developers

Working freelance with digital agency Fortune Cookie, Janet carried out a range of research activities to understand how users planned rail journeys, their opinions about the site and how it could be improved.

The research output was used to develop personas of the key users, task analyses of the main user tasks, and descriptions of a set of 'user journeys' (not rail journeys!).

Working as part of the design team, Janet used this and other output to re-structure the information content and provided a detailed sitemap for the new site structure.

Activities included:

• face to face passenger survey
• phone survey with call centre staff
• task analysis
• persona development
• description of user journeys
• producing detailed sitemaps for each section of the site

(Undertaken and managed by Fortune Cookie)

Janet provided IA support and consultancy to several projects for leading digital agency HarvestDigital. She created user- focused concepts for the re-design of a motor trading site, using Visio wireframes .

In a subsequent project, she produced information flow wireframes and sitemaps for a motor-dealing micro-site.

Activities included:

• User centred analysis
• Information design
• Wireframes and sitemaps in Visio
• Consultancy

(Undertaken and managed by Harvest Digital)

Achilles Ltd provides software for standards management. They developed the E-TASC system, a UN Consortium project for managing Corporate Social Responsibility across the IT industry.

Janet played a central role as BA to the project, preparing functional specs, UML use cases, screen layouts in Visio and Photoshop.

She also prepared presentations for customer workshops, and worked alongside the development team to ensure overall usability of screens.

In addition she played a major role in mapping Achilles' payment and CRM processes for the E-TASC scheme.

Activities included:

• User centred analysis
• Information design
• Preparing Functional specs
• Payment process mapping
• CRM process definition
• Usability Consultancy

Janet is a great BA with extremely perceptive ideas on user experience - she copes wonderfully under pressure and has a really nice personality.

Vic Webb, project manager, managed Janet at Achilles Group Ltd