About This Project

For the duration of my internship, I designed the training portion of the new NCR documentation website. I worked with two interns with backgrounds in computer science and content strategy. We conducted market and user research for training and learning sites in general. We then used our findings to create an initial design and prototype, which we were able to test with users. We presented the final prototype to NCR's Experience Design team along with suggestions for further UX improvements.

The Challenge

At the time of the project, we found three main issues with the state of NCR's training arsenal:

1. Most resources that could be useful to end-users were unnecessarily locked behind authentication.
2. The training was hosted on various websites that were in no way interlinked.
3. The formatting of the training was inconsistent and varied based on product and/or line of business.

Knowing this, we set some initial goals for the final design, which we refined through subsequent research:

1. Organized - how can we create a site that is easy to navigate?
2. Cohesive - how can we push the training to be cohesive within itself and with NCR's branding as a whole?
3. Flexible - how can we format the site so that it can hold a variety of training types?
4. Scalable - how can we make sure to build the site for the future state when there will be a ton of training for various user groups?

Solution

Discovery

Interviews

We interviewed 8 NCR employees who are affiliated with training creation or use. Their responses helped us determine the user personas, the current state of training, and key features to consider moving forward.

Competitor Analysis

We looked at the training sites of 18 competitors. We ranked the competing websites on various metrics to communicate with the docs site team which sites we thought would be good to emulate.

Content Analysis

The final information we needed was where to find the current NCR training and what format it exists in. We found that it existed in a plethora of websites across various platforms.

UX Design

Since navigation is so important for a documentation site, we started off the design process by figuring out the IA and making some user flows and journey maps.

Information Architecture

Building off of what the docs site team had already created for the overall docs site IA, we fleshed out the training portion based on how we can logically bucket information.

User Flow

Next, we created a user flow informed by what we learned in our interviews. Working on this helped up validate whether our IA had grouped the information and pages well. It also forced us to think through the experience step-by-step and brought to light any gaps and pages we might have forgotten to mock up.

Journey Maps

We created journey maps based on our key persona groups. This helped us break down the user's thoughts and interactions before, during, and after their visit to the site. By looking at the full journey, we were about to extract additional insights and opportunities that would both help NCR better serve its customers and promote their products and solutions.

UI Design

Sketches

I started ideating by sketching out ideas for the different pages. This step helps me to get my ideas down quickly and brainstorm different layouts.

Low-fidelity Mockups

I used Figma to transform my sketches into low-fidelity mockups, further brainstorming layouts and consulting with my teammates about various design ideas.

Mid-fidelity Mockups

I then applied brand colors, graphics, and filler text to make mid-fidelity mockups that could be presented to the team for feedback.

High-fidelity Mockups

For the final screens, we created a more comprehensive set of screens for the entire website. This included everything from updating graphics on some of the pages to creating additional pages and modals that we could prototype into a full website demo for the stakeholders to see.

Final Clickable Prototype

We created a final prototype of the site in Figma. We wanted it to be very clickable so that we could present it to the head of design at NCR and use it for user testing.

User Testing

We were able to do some initial A/B testing with eight internal NCR employees. We tested two different prototypes with designers, software developers, and the training creators we initially interviewed. We found that:

• All of the users were able to complete the tasks successfully
• Only 16.7% of pages they landed on were extraneous
• They spent an average of 14.67 seconds on each task.

Results

At the end of our internship, we presented this feature as our intern expo project. For the presentation, I created a promotional video using Adobe After Effects and my teammates created a supplementary slideshow. Together, we presented the Docs Site Training along with some design edits we made based on user feedback.

• Provided the Docs Site team with UI designs they could use and expand upon.
• Created presentations and a video to use as internal marketing for the docs site to get buy-in from both upper level management and teams that could benefit from putting their docs on the site.

Design Edits

Card Redesign

The eight user testers gave feedback on the importance of each piece of information on the cards, so we rearranged what was displayed on the default and hover states to reflect their feedback.

Sort By Feature

One of the features that received support across the board was a "sort by" option in the directory.

Recommendations

We left the Docs Site team with a summarized list of recommendations for further design iterations. These included suggestions that looked to the future state like subscriptions to products and tags and suggestions for design changes that we didn't have time to fully flesh out.

Personal Learnings

I had two major takeaways from this project and internship:

• I was able to understand the distinctions between the different disciplines of UX: service design, UX architecture, UX design, UI design, and UX research. The project covered the entire design process from discovery to polished prototype, so I was able to ask for guidance from each of the UX disciplines and apply the advice I received along the way.
• I learned more about how design projects are managed in a big corporate company setting. I learned how projects are prioritized and funded and how that might determine what employees get to spend their time on.

Overall, this project helped me better understand the UX process in a corporate setting and introduced me to many talented designers who guided me along the way.