CASE STUDY 1:
Uncovering Insights: Research and Discovery for Deloitte's Leading HR Platform
Introduction
Deloitte’s Bersin HR research platform was visually outdated at acquisition, offered limited functionality, and was cognitively overwhelming for users. The platform needed a complete overhaul as user friction and engagement were increasing. The goal of the research and discovery phase was to uncover specific user pain points and establish a clear direction for a new MVP.
Client: Deloitte. Berson By Deloitte.
Position: Lead UX Design and Research
Customer Insights:
Through customer interviews, several key problems emerged. Users struggled with friction in finding relevant HR knowledge quickly, sharing findings efficiently, and filtering through HR terminology. Additionally, they expressed frustration with the need for third-party tools to take notes and document their research. Users also wanted a responsive platform that allowed them to read and interact with content on mobile devices, such as tablets while commuting.
Methods:
The team employed a combination of qualitative interviews, empathy mapping, and story mapping exercises to gain a deeper understanding of user needs. The team gathered comprehensive insights that shaped the project's direction by involving key stakeholders and customers in a week-long off-site workshop.
Conclusion:
The research phase revealed critical issues with usability, discoverability, and the need for more interactive features. These insights laid the foundation for the next step: the development of a user-friendly, responsive HR research tool that could better serve Deloitte's customer base and streamline workflows.
Extensive customer interviews resulted in customer empathy mapping. A focus was given to tier-one customers, such as the Walt Disney HR team.
Analytics Usage Audit
Discoveries in the Usage audit led to sweeping changes in the new IA map and feature offerings.
An analytics-driven usage audit allowed Deloitte's team to identify underutilized areas of the old HR research platform quickly.
The team determined which features and sections were no longer valuable to users by examining customer engagement patterns. This data-driven insight guided eliminating non-essential components, ensuring the new information architecture was streamlined, efficient, and tailored to user needs. This approach helped to optimize the overall platform by focusing on the most impactful and relevant features for end-users.
Through a design, thinking facilitation, extensive backlog, investigations, and audits were also performed and ultimately flushed out into revised user stories aligned to interview findings. These were then divided into potential release dates and added into Jeera. We used Storiesonboard as a story mapping tool.
“Usability is about people and how they understand and use things, not about technology.”
- Steve Krug