Projects / schark! - Hitachi GST
schark! (a division of T4G) was contracted to compete a usability study of the intranet site for Hitachi GST a US manufacturer of computer hard drives. Two weeks before the study was to begin, schark’s usability specialist left the company to take a new position.
Left without resources and needing a usability expert they could trust, schark! looked to ADGi to deliver the services.
Hitachi GST had already had an excellent experience with schark’s former usability specialist on an external website and was now seeking to tackle an even bigger problem, their intranet.
Hitachi GST had determined that the approach they wanted to take was a usability study with 12 participants from three segments: Managers, Administrators, Subject Matter Experts. They wanted to use the results to gain support and funding for a major redesign.
Given that we were called in at the last minute we had very little influence over the design of the study. We conducted the 12 tests over three days, each test took approximately 2 hours. We noted a trend very quickly that users who were trained (usually by an administrator) to complete a specific task (e.g. book a boardroom) were able to compete the task but had several work-around tricks to overcome the usability issue on the site.
Given that the study report was going to be used to get funding for future projects for the site, we felt strongly that the report needed to drive to a solution and make strong recommendations. It also needed to point to short term solutions that could be implemented for little or no cost so that the Intranet Manager could start to reverse negative impressions employees had towards the site and the company.
We also looked at the time spent on tasks and suggested how much they could be improved. For instance, the boardroom booking task took on average 15 minutes for a new user and 7 for a trained user. We report suggested that the task time should be reduced to an average of 3 minutes and should not need any training. This pointed directly to the return on investment the company would see if they improved that one tool.
The report also offered letter grades as to the usability of the various features that were tested. This gave the intranet manager a ‘yard stick’ against which to measure the site. Now instead of saying that users had trouble or can’t do something, she can say, the boardroom booking tool is getting an F in usability and is costing x dollars a year in wasted productivity.