Major Tom’s internal folder management information architecture Case Study

When tasked with the mandate to redesign the Major Tom filing system, my UX collegue Ed and I started looking at the projects we were already involved in, looking for similarities and differences in how our account managers all set about organizing themselves and how the teams followed suit, or not…

After the mapping process, we started to lay out a structure of the patterns we were seeing, tied them together with the Major Tom process, and then came up with a system we wanted to test on the account managers, on staff members and on colleagues, to see if what we had hypothesized might work.

5 members form the Toronto and New York offices:

1. 2 sales reps
2. 2 team members from paid social
3. An account manager

We selected this group of 10 partly because we were looking for a cross section of work types. We wanted to be connecting with the account managers who would be setting up these account files going forward, as well as regular members of our team who would be using the files to search for information or adding pieces of work to the new file system.

We had the western team bring their laptops and meet us in the boardroom. We wanted the east and west teams to participate in a closed card sort through Mural, so they could all complete the same task, and we would have a record of it all. We conducted the user testing for the eastern team remotely over a Zoom meeting.

We built each member of the testing group their own Mural board with the same 20 post-it notes on the right hand side and down the left side a layout of the file structure we had developed based on our deep dive into the current filing that goes on in the office.

We set the stage for both teams:
“Kellie’s has tasked us to OPTIMIZE the current Information Architecture (IA) for the filling system based on the new phased process implemented at Major Tom in 2019 And our main goals for this internal projects are:”

• To ensure everybody speaks the same language – we understand that we work in different departments and because of that we do things differently, but at the end of the day, it’s important to be one happy family!
• To ensure project files are easy to find – no one likes to spend a lot of time to find something.
• To ensure everybody knows where to save a file so people can find it easily – we know it’s challenging, but we believe we have some good ideas to support you.

After studying all these clients, we came up with this structure. Please access the links for the activity!

Activity

• Your goal is to move the Post Its notes into the proper folders – what you think makes more sense to you.
• Please keep in mind that we’ll discuss the answers right after you finish.

Our Validation Criteria consisted of:

• Relevancy: Does the page meet user expectations – both in terms of content and design? How can it be a closer match to what they want even more?
• Clarity: Is the content/offer on this page as clear as possible? How can we make it clearer, simpler?
• Value: Is it communicating value to the user? Can we do better? Can we increase user motivation?
• Friction: what on this page is causing doubts, hesitations, and uncertainties? What makes the process difficult? How can we simplify? We can’t reduce friction entirely, we can only minimize it.
• Distraction: what’s on the page that is not helping the user take action? Is anything unnecessarily drawing attention? If it’s not motivation, it’s friction – and thus it might be a good idea to get rid of it.

We quickly learned a few things, not everyone knew what the names of all the different teams’ pieces of work were, which we figured would happen, but were happily surprised that the team was willing to set those Post-Its aside and focus on the things they knew.

We also learned that there was a lot of work that could be shared across teams that the individual team members didn’t really realize was being done on a different part of the project by another team member (user personas from the UX department as well as marketing personas)

The team was very engaged in solving the task at hand and brought up questions around clients that have more then 1 project, or were more legacy clients?

We were also happy to learn that most of the research we had done, deep diving into the maze of client files that were in the company, had paid off. We had only over looked a few file items the teams were interested in. We had broken out meeting munites and recordings folder by phase, when the team really wanted one master folder for those items because they were worried they might forget, what phase the meeting was originally in.

Issues also came up around “what if a document might apply to 2 projects a client has on the go currently?” Luckily this issue is solved by using Google Docs and their ability to save one document in multiple places: https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9310352?hl=en&ref_topic=9300128

When presenting our final proposal to the company at a lunch and learn we built a slide deck that delved into all the work we had done to get to the point of launching this new system across the company. As the UX team we felt that including all the background into what the UX department does as well as linking it to our most fundamental practice of finding a problem, researching it, developing a strategy, test, iterate, test… Showing how we had included members of the office to help us test this new process, how we learned and iterated, and then decided to bring it to the company and “go live” would encourage user adoption as this was a company mandated change, we didn’t want our team/users to feel they were being forced to make a change to ‘their systems’ and give them the opportunity to understand how we got here.