The Challenge:

The IT organization of a large academic health system had a web landscape that had grown in an ad hoc fashion, with various departments either having their own web presence or having none at all. To give the digital landscape a refresh, showing a united cross-departmental front, leadership wanted a clean IT website for the whole organization.

The Solution:

This business need lined up perfectly with a new enterprise solution that was being built with Acquia/Drupal 8. The team decided to launch the enterprise MVP with the IT site, iteratively phasing in new features and outcomes as the product itself grew.

My Role:

I was one of two Product Managers on the Acquia product, and our main role in the implementation was to gather requirements, build and tend to the roadmap, groom the backlog, wrangle cross-team priorities, facilitate collaboration cross-departmentally, contribute to the development of a shared web component library, act as the Product Owners in the SCRUM process, roadshow it around the organization to garner buy-in, and manage resourcing.

Tools Used:

Acquia/Drupal 8, JIRA, Roadmunk, Adobe CC, Invision, Acquia, Flowmapp, StoriesOnBoard, PatternLab, persona creation, user testing.

 
 
 

Discovery & Design

 
 

UX research and strategy

Before the Acquia project began, we were able to get UX work prioritized and my team dove in with bells and whistles on.

There was some existing data, so we set to work gathering, compiling, and analyzing. We organized the facts, listed the assumptions, cited the unknowns, then got to talking to folks.

We ran multiple interview rounds with stakeholders and users across the organization, creating 1:1 personas, empathy maps, and win statements for 5 user segments.

  • Competitive analysis

  • Stakeholder interviews

  • User interviews

  • Persona creation

  • Mapping; empathy, journey

  • User ‘win’ statements

 
Mallory-Persona.png
Mallory-Empathy.png
Mallory-Win.png
User-Story-Map.png

Usability testing

We recruited for users to test the largest existing site that was going to be folding into the new combined IT website. We set up a temporary testing lab in a central location, and ran a small testing round over a two week period.

We tested our assumed trouble areas and gathered additional feedback to loop back into the process.

 

Information architecture

As we began to think through consolidating multiple sites into one, I started to map that out.

Using Flowmapp for the task flow and sitemap management, I was able to visualize that and share it with cross-departmental teams for feedback.

Site-Map-Revised.png
 

UX recommendations

The UX work wrapped and we tied all the artifacts and recommendations together with a bow to present across the leadership areas. Using an action priority matrix model, I mapped the 35 recommendations into three phases.

These recommendations were:

  • Ranked and prioritized

  • Organized into business category of work

  • Listed with justification category (UX activity)

  • Roughly 34% of the recommended actions overlapped with content strategy already underway

Of the 35 recommendations to come out of the UX work, 15 of them were added into the MVP developed, with the rest of them slated for other phases of the implementation. Additional testing is planned for further validation, followed by product iteration as needed.

Agile development

The development for this product was run in SCRUM (2-week sprints) using JIRA (dev/backlog) and Roadmunk (roadmap). We delivered the product in phases, starting with an MVP that could be iterated on.

The team was lucky in a couple of ways:

  • The organization trusted us enough to dedicate resources and time before development kicked off to do UX work.

  • We collaborated with other teams from UC Davis, UCLA, and UCSF to develop a shared Drupal code base. This amounted to us not starting from scratch, gave our team some massive cost savings, and built strong relationships.

With this in mind, we delivered on an initial MVP in 7 sprints. We built for a multi-site environment in Acquia Site Factory, starting with one initial theme using Drupal 8.

 

Key Learnings

  • We won a University of California Sautter Award for the collaborative effort to build a shared code base that would help other UC teams as they develop their enterprise solutions with Acquia/Drupal.

  • Cross-team, cross-departmental, and cross-organization collaboration is key. We succeed wildly when we do it together.

  • Creating empathy for our user’s current experience within our leadership teams gave us more runway to research them.

  • Showing the ROI and other benefits to dedicating institutional resources for UX was critical. The next projects/products in this organization will likely include a research portion in the project charters.