Your "one-stop shop" for all things IPR!

IPR analysts lack an efficient way to access quick answers to nuanced business questions, leading to task delays, leadership frustration, and potential business implications.
 

IPR analysts feel flustered when asked questions they are unsure how to research. The current portal is time-consuming and often does not provide the answers or direction they are looking for.
 

When IPR analysts see information that was created over a year ago, there is no way for them to gauge the accuracy of that information

To ensure a broad picture and perspective, I had weekly meetings with the following internal and external partners to provide critical guidance:

IPR Learning Team

VOA (Voice of the Associate) Committee

Inventory Transformation Leadership

Sample groups of IPR Analysts and Managers

EUX Mentorship and Oversight

Personal plug - I will happily take disagreement/input here.

In my personal experience, my previous employers had either a "guide" for on-boarding (previously, I was tasked with writing one myself), or a more tenured associate would show me the lay of the land with no documents on processes or best practices. A part of my user interview script was to pick their brains on other companies who may have a similar database to conduct a competitive analysis, and I came up empty. 

• Two ways to navigate to this section of the portal.
   
• Lack of design consistency in landing page.
   
• Lack of design consistency within each sub-page.
  • Mixture of additional landing pages, webpages, and folders.
    • Quick win: A singular page (Tools & Reporting SOPs) contains an additional column displaying how many files are contained within each folder.
       
• Two links (IPR Newsletter & Interline/Pro) on main landing page are mis-linked.

• Two ways to navigate to this section of the portal.
   
• Lack of design consistency in landing page.
  • Both page lay out, and button sizes/design.
     
• Better design consistency within each sub-page.
  • Lack of sub-page design consistency.
  • A win is within the storytelling of the sub-pages. This ultimately informed how I would design the sub-pages in the new portal.
     
• Many empty folders within pages.
   
• Love the webpage feel of these to help the user know if this is the page they need to be on.

• Users are very happy the simplicity and organization but feel it is not intuitive for users to need to scroll through the whole page.
  • Minimized banner size to decrease scrolling needed.
• Icon/Description feedback
  • Icons are easy to understand, and design informs what is linked. 
  • Descriptions should be short and to-the-point. Additional feedback on font size being too small.
• Sidebar Navigation
  • Discovered additional drop-down functionality for this within SharePoint, which satisfied an asked for “breadcrumb” navigation.
• Most feedback regarding in-page navigation buttons was neutral. 
  • Asked to include arrows to draw attention to a “back” action.

• Removed frequently used reporting. 
  • Originally, I thought it would be valuable to include a list of the most frequently used reports within the reporting suite with an explanation of what that report could be used for. Users felt this muddied up the page and ultimately would rather than information live in the reporting suite.
  • Ultimately this will be a separate UX project to re-imaging the Reporting Suite.
• Add in a “general” section, then break out into links that are function-specific.
  • i.e. – all teams use the IPR Reporting Suite, there is no need to redundantly link that page.