What I worked on: User experience, Research, User testing, Workshop Facilitation, Interaction Design & Visual Design.
Recognitions: Winner of the ‘Best new market research product/service’ at Quirk’s Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards.
Project: Defining a 3 year vision for The Hub - their new digital platform + other related product and service design tasks throughout the company.
Client: Hall & Partners
Agency: Furthermore
We’ve worked together with the team at The Hub, Hall & Partners’ insights platform, for a couple of years now. They platform was in need of a redesign and there were no service or product strategy in place for how it would evolve and grow over the years. We were brought in to envision the product and service roadmap, define a strategy and re-imagine its features.
This project is ongoing as we are designing and building all the features and ideas we’ve selected for the 3 year vision for Hall & Partners.
THE PROCESS
We started the project with lots of service design workshops together with idea validation through user research. We spoke to the internal team members, senior management and leadership teams as well as current and potential clients. Large envisioning workshops were held, which included mapping out a service blueprint, examining the needs of users at each stage of their journey through a series of customer journey framework workshops, collaborative sketching with clients to come up with new ideas to solve these issues. Design hypotheses were formed to help frame this research, distill findings and later also tested against users.
Through our initial user research, we discovered:
The Hub’s proposition was not clear for first time users.
When users first see the data pages the tool offers, it is not obvious how they should use the page, in particular compare, filter and share data.
The insight stories containing modern cultural references made the content more relatable and fun.
Information that is grouped into numbered clear chunks were easier and more pleasurable to read.
Users were confused around the navigation terms and mechanic.
UI was not intuitive, often inconsistent and left users confused.
It was important that we only developed features that would either solve genuine user needs or help the business achieve their wider goals.
Based on all these findings we recommended an overarching concept and direction for the The Hub, to create a multi-functional platform that allows for, real-time storytelling, powered by the latest data and real people.
We worked in design sprints where each interactive prototype represented one of the core themes of our concept or features for the app. These prototypes were then used for research with internal teams and clients of Hall and Partners. Using qualitative methods we aimed to get a sense of how people currently used the platform and consider how the proposed solution would meet their needs.
THE RESULT
As this is an ongoing project with new implementations and work coming in regularly the platform is really coming together through an iterative process. I’m currently working together with H&P’s internal dev team to UX, design and develop and improve new features for the platform. A lot of features are still in development but here are a few highlights we’ve done so far:
🎊 We’ve defined a new look & feel to the brand that are now implemented through out the site.
This was especially hard since we had to consider each client had their own brand colors integrated to the platform, so each module needed to work with a selection of colours.
🎊 We launched a new and improved homepage design and navigation. The menu structure had to be able to handle 4+ levels and give users quicker access to the most useful content.
🎊 I worked to create a massive search function that allows users to find a variety of different formed content through out the site and a helpful filtering mechanic.
🎊 We created a way to easily write and share helpful insights and news stories with the wider team:
🎊 A brand new function where user can easily interact and compare their data sets.
Here’s an emoji sneak peak on what’s to come:
📌🤖☁️🤝📡📈
EXCITING TIMES AHEAD!