product design leadership : content strategy
Streamlining Communication with a Universal Notes Application
The Challenge
The business services fulfillment team for a major telco was struggling with a problem: It was difficult to construct the “story of an order.”
This is because there was no single, universally accessible place for users across departments to enter or find notes. Notes had to be entered in specific tasks and across systems that not all users had access or visibility to. That meant key team members were missing crucial communications or having to enter the same note in multiple places — just to ensure visibility.
The setup for the Universal Notes direction & alignment workshop I facilitated
A workshop exercise to help the product team hone note types & taxonomy
An exercise to help the product team settle on a controlled tag vocabulary
Our Approach
As Experience Director, I led a cross-disciplinary team to observe users and conduct generative research to understand key communication points and milestones. We also worked closely with development teams to understand the technical possibilities — including where we could reuse aspects of the existing notes system.
Our Team
Experience Director (yours truly), Experience Designer, Research Strategist, Project Manager, and Program Director. We also worked directly with the client’s Product Owner, technical architects, and engineers as an embedded part of their product team.
My Contributions
Contextualized business goals, objectives, and outcomes for the team.
Created and facilitated a workshop to help the product team define and align on note types, tags, taxonomy, and underlying metadata. Created and maintained the data dictionary for the engineering team.
Created the content strategy for the Universal Notes application. Built and maintained the data dictionary for the engineering team.
Co-led user research with a cross-section of several user groups to observe processes, obstacles, and pain points, then synthesized to create a prioritized list of user needs and opportunities. Conducted user validation.
Provided creative direction and oversight for design team efforts ensure output was aligned with business and user needs and UX best practices.
Served as design team representative in solutioning and grooming sessions.
Contributed to the client’s user education content and training materials.
Ensured the team had the right information and resources to do their jobs and cleared up any ambiguity that proved an obstacle.
Course-corrected during project pivots and reviewed work for quality and adherence to business and user goals.
Acted as a key point of contact for our client and executive sponsors. Demonstrated and justified design concepts and direction, serving as an advocate for end users.
An early wireframe of the universally accessible notes drawer
Users could add or find note from any of the applications they used to manage day-to-day work
Robust filters help users quickly find relevant notes for any order, customer, site, or product
The Solution
What We Built: A universally available notes system with a flexible tagging and categorization system to make notes entry and retrieval fast and easy.
The Results: Introducing this new universal notes application:
Ensures transparent communication across departments, creating alignment and efficient transfer of knowledge
Saves note takers and finders additional steps, facilitating quicker transfer of crucial information