OneSource Information Services
I led the design effort for a high-performance internal team charged with creating OneSource’s next-generation business information product, code-named Denali. It was a tool to help provide business information specifically to sales people to help them better position themselves, their company, and their product with their prospects.
Challenge
OneSource Information Services, a spinoff from Lotus in the mid/late-nineties, was the first major player to take what had been a CD-ROM business information product and deliver it via the web. Since that time, they had been coasting largely on the strength of their initial product. In the early 2000s though, they began facing increasing competition from players such as Factiva and Hoovers who were developing superior web products.
Solution
In order to deliver a newly designed product that would provide compelling value to our market, I launched a comprehensive user research effort in order to deeply understand the movivations and needs of our target users—sales people. Only by keeping a focus on the pain points and motivations of these sales users could we hope to design a product that would effectively compete with Factiva and Hoovers. This resulted in a set of designs—executed as conceptual models, wireframes, and ultimately visual designs—that delivered the value to address all the key needs and pain points uncovered as part of the user research.
To deliver this solution, I needed to pull together a cross-functional team consisting of product management, engineering, project management, design and senior executive sponsors. I was able to bring these stakeholders together around both a new design process and the direction dictated by our research and thus create the support necessary to move forward with the designs. I subsequently led the team and managed a small team of designers to execute the design effort.
Result
While well underway with the design and development of the product, OneSource was acquired by InfoUSA as a strategic move to capture OneSource's clients. Now owned by a parent company with a completely different strategic focus, the Denali project was no longer a high priority item, and was put on hold.
Below are deliverables that represent much of the work I completed for the project before it's ultimate cancellation.
Discovery Docs
As the project kicked off, I worked extensively with the product team, including product management, marketing and engineering, to understand our users. I discovered that there was very little user-centric institutional knowledge regarding the target market and users for the product we were building. For this reason, I conducted extensive interviews with over 10 members of the target audience in order to understand what their needs and pain points were with regard to the information that was helpful to them in working with and landing prospects.
Briefing Presentation
This was a presentation I gave to the product team and executive leadership briefing them on the substance of what I uncovered as part of the research.
User Personas
After identifying the user groups for which Denali would solve an addressable problem, I produced a user persona for each of the two types of sales user Denali would eventually serve.
Design Framework
User Experience Framework Document
As OneSource's first true UX Designer and as someone the team was looking to for leadership, I felt it was important to set the stage for how the UX discipline would be applied to the particular project on which we were embarking as well as provide some insight for the larger team as to how the process should unfold. This document contained the slides I used for the presentation I gave to the team that started the discussion.
Denali UX Architecture
Before diving into wireframes and particular user flows, I worked with the team to map out in broad strokes the different use cases and pull them together in a conceptual model that would block out how the various flows would fit together in a larger product. The PDF to the right pulls together some of these high level conceptual models along with some of the more detailed UX design concepts which I used at various stages before diving into wireframes of actual screens.
Selected Wireframes
The product evolved through two major iterations as changes were made to both business strategy and management structure. Working from the conceptual models that I collaborated with the team to produce, I then produced detailed wireframes for all key functionality throughout both iterations. The PDF to the right represents a small sample of some of the primary screens at one point in one iteration.
Visual Design Treatments
I hired and managed a visual designer to develop three visual themes for the wireframes. I presented these visual themes to the executive team who provided feedback which enabled my team to take a single treatment, make modifications, and emerge with our final visual design.
HTML Prototypes
I hired and managed a front end developer/prototyper to work with myself and the visual designer to turn the final visual design into html prototypes for handoff to the engineering team. The prototyper created HTML mockups of all wireframes.
