Written by Rita Francois as final assessment of the course Design Thinking and Innovation   offered by the University of Virginia at the platform of Coursera.org

Reflection - Visualization

Challenge & Selection

At the beginning of my internship as an HR Assistant I noticed that the HR department  stored data at different places on their network. Sometimes it took them a while to find  certain information about their employees, which was time-consuming and very ineffective.  The existing file where they kept track of the attended trainings had become difficult to use  over the past few years. This was due to the fact that some data were manually entered,  which led to different ways of writing, typos and inconsistency. As my internship went on, I  discovered other administrative problems as well. I asked myself whether I could help them  solve their problems in an efficient way. I decided to focus on simplifying a part of the HR  department’s administrative process. I used design thinking to accomplish my goal. Since I  knew that the HR team was not used to work with a lot of technology I had to make  everything more tangible by creating a logical structure using a lot of images and making  everything as simple as I could. The main tool that I used was visualization.

Application

I had a conversation with my mentor to have a better idea of her expectations. I started  drawing some ideas and presented them to the team. After they gave me some feedback I  had an even better understanding of their needs. I started by filtering all the data, making a  distinction between the necessary data and the redundant data. After that I started creating  a database: a structure in which data only needs to be entered once.

To make the database easy to use and to visualize as much as possible, I created a  switchboard (a main interface) that gave access to all underlying forms and reports (in one  single click). The macros that I included were made of little drawings that made it very easy  to return to the switchboard.

I explained all the technicalities in a well-structured and visual manual so the HR team can  continue to simplify and automate their administrative processes.

When I finished the project and before I presented the manual to the team, I placed myself  in the minds of my colleagues. I knew and understood the tool that had created but they did  not. It was crucial to include more visual elements in the manual so the team would clearly  understand the functionalities of this new database. Therefore, I also created user stories.

With this in mind, I had the idea of re-building the old way of registration with Lego cubes  and the new database with Duplo cubes (to have a better idea of what I mean I included a  photo on the next page). Each cube in the front contains data from different categories. The  blue cube i.e. contains personal information (that comes from the green cubes in the back),  information on training courses (that comes from the yellow cubes) and information on  training courses (that comes from the red cubes). The database provides a link structure (if  you look closely at the picture you can see some wires). These categories can be linked to  each other. In addition, relationships with primary keys can be selected. Of course I was  using a lot of hand gestures while explaining this and as you can see from the blue cube at  the side of the panel, I was holding it during the presentation, so that I could show it more  visually.

Written by Rita Francois as final assessment of the course Design Thinking and Innovation   offered by the University of Virginia at the platform of Coursera.org

Insight & Approach

When I presented the manual and the cubes to the team I realized that it really depends on  the type of learner that I have in front of me because there are some profiles that are more  visual than others. I decided to adjust the strategy and to take visualization to the next level  by organizing 5 workshops that allowed me to conduct the team through the actual workings  of the database.

Later I also got to the idea to not only visualize how to use the tool but also why they should  continue using it. I tried to stimulate them in a different way. I made it very evident to the  leadership team that this database would represent savings to the company.

I cannot say that I would use this tool again in the future for this type of project seeing that  it depends on the public you are working with. In my case, I adjusted the strategy based on  the type of profile that I had in front of me as future users.

