Challenge on implementation of digital strategy in a large corporation
With the deepening of digitalization, in a giant multinational enterprise, it is always a tough question how to steer, oversee, and measure the implementation of a digital strategy. Besides, in order to avoid overlapping efforts on similar products, how to create transparency and centralize the information are currently common topics for large corporations.
My Role
As a design thinking/user-centric-design coach/expert, one of my responsibilities was to lead design workshops and to select and adopt methods within the workshops to ensure that all data and user insights are collected. And kept workshops running smoothly, as this is an important part of the preliminary step within the project process.
I collaborated with the PO (PM) and various other stakeholders across the company to ensure the product design and product strategy could well reflect those user needs and also match business requirements.
Moreover, I led the end-to-end design to assure the requirements were transferred into compelling UXUI solutions. Last but not the least, I also worked closely with the engineering team to ultimately ensure quality standards and the alignment between design and implementation.
Design the workshop and create workshop toolkits
With the aim of creating transparency and data centralization, a large global internal research was implemented in 2018. Before all research workshops, I joined this project in its early stages. Together with a strategy team, a workshop process was defined. In order to support the process and make it smooth, several maps, cards, and an instruction book were thoughtfully designed which would be easily used in the research workshops to collect user insights.
Research
The research was run in 11 locations across 34 markets globally. Various people participated in the workshops, with different knowledge backgrounds, from staff level to senior managing director. Tons of data were collected and delivered to the headquarters and analyzed systematically by various methods.
Concept Exploration and Refinement
With the analyzed data, several product ideas were explored. In this phase, I was mainly responsible to spearhead the UX and UI direction. Basic UI components were created to keep a consistent visual design. Clear feature architecture is refined which can provide the right information at the right time to help users focus on what is important.
Working closely with developers, the design has been implemented and launched in 12 markets with more than 1000 active users so far. We are seeing it attracting more users and users getting benefits by using this tool.
Constant Testing and Iteration
In this project, user feedback is placed at a particularly high level. This product itself is characterized as a tool to improve management transparency, so consideration for real users is the primary criterion. To this end, comprehensive user testings were constantly run in different locations globally. Multiple rounds of iterations were adopted to ensure user satisfaction with the function and acceptance of the process. In addition, the potential future needs from users were captured during testing. In particular, data-driven methods were used continuously within the design team internally. They were carried out ahead of time as part of usability testing, such as eye-tracking.
Rollout & Impact
With constantly rolling out new versions of new features, it resolves the pains for the topic managers, regional managers, executives, and plenty of other colleagues when it comes to global multi-projects and digital strategy management. It provides an easy tool to steer the level of digitalization in different perspectives, oversee the digital strategy, avoid overlapping efforts on the same or similar projects/products ultimately improving the efficiency.
During the time, we also constantly adapt our design in order to improve tool performance when loading a huge amount of data. Working closely with developers, the design has been implemented and launched in more than 27 markets with thousands of daily active users so far.
Post-launch, the internal market share was improved to 90%+. And the complex daily operation time was reduced from hours to 30 min.
