Overview
Over a course of 9 months, I worked with the United States Patents and Trademarks Office in a remote capacity. Since their user experience department was small and growing still, I was actively involved in a multitude of different projects. In addition to conducting interviews and assessing the needs of company’s employees, I redesigned pages to ensure pages met accessibility guidelines.
Disclaimer: The full extent of my work at USPTO is under an NDA, but I've outlined a high level overview of my work below. Please contact me sjnagasuri@gmail.com with any questions you may have.
Timeline: Sep 2022 - May 2023 (9 months)
Role: CX & UX Extern
Team: My manager and another CX extern
Tools: Microsoft Powerpoint, Sharepoint
The Work - a timeline and overview
01 September through December
Understanding the problem space by asking USPTO employees
As a newcomer, I wanted to understand the unique interactions of USPTO employees with the intranet and ensure I was spending my internship designing something that employees felt would improve their time at USPTO. Hence, I decided to conduct focus groups as an exploratory first step.
While creating a script for focus groups, I focused on asking employees guiding questions to identify opportunity areas
| Prior to the pandemic, what did you typically use the intranet for?
| During the pandemic, how has this changed?
| Which resources do you use the most?
| What is communication like as a remote employee?
Conducting focus groups in order to draw insights
We conducted two focus groups, each of which had about 15 people from different sectors of USPTO. With the aid of my carefully constructed questionnaire and a roundtable style discussion I drew several insights and discovered opportunity areas.
Positive Insights: USPTO was home to several great resources, answers to most questions that employees had could be found on the intranet
Negative Insights: employees felt disconnected from each other post-pandemic, in-person resources had disappeared, communication between employees was limited to Teams calls and messages, intranet pages were not pleasing to look at for long periods of time
Opportunity Areas Identified:
Employees heightened feelings of disconnectedness prompted the need for resources that keep them invested their work
Style and UX Changes are needed to ensure employees can easily navigate the site
Wireframes
To help vitalize a sense of community within USPTO, I focused on redesigning three specific intranet pages: the Community Page, the employees features page, and the company updates newsletter.
I created low-fi and hi-fi prototypes for the employees features page and the company updates newsletter. After presenting to the teams who develop those pages, I was able to hand off to them.
With the community page, I was able to stay a little more involved beyond just the initial designs I had created as there was not a dedicated team working on the intranet community page.
02 January through May
Card Sorting
Based on the low-fi and hi-fi prototypes, I helped conduct 5+ usability sessions with managers of different teams within USPTO. These insights that we gathered were carefully organized and sorted into 5 different categories.
These 5 different categories were: navigation, colors + typography, newsfeed, upcoming events, resources (internal + external), and posting announcements.
The insights generated from user testing were placed into one of 5 categories and changes to the prototype were made accordingly.
Iterating
Based on the results of the usability session testing, we determined we had to made specific changes to
the way users could post announcements as 4/5 users didn’t enjoy the current method of doing so
which resources we posted as 3/5 users thought the ones listed (especially the internal resources) were not very useful
We did receive positive feedback on the
colors and typography as they fully met accessibility standards
navigation as it was much easier to understand how to the parts than before
the newsfeed section, especially in regards to the placement of such
My Impact
Designed to fit a specific target audience with key accessibility characteristics
analyzed average age of employees and blockers they had while using the current intranet
sought to eliminate these blockers with the new design and create a more accessible design - especially regarding color contrasts, text size, and clickable features
Brought a more research based focus to the process of redesigning their intranet
researched appropriate methods of gathering user feedback and conducting user research to ensure that intranet was well designed
aligned designs with accessibility standards and comfortability levels of target users
Takeaways
Accessibility for one is accessibility for all. Making sure that one user can easily access and use the entire intranet can make a big difference.
Communication across channels makes a big difference. A key factor to my success at USPTO was derived partially from my personal policy on communication. Ensuring that everyone was on the same page in terms of designs and next steps was very important to moving my individual project forward.
Turn lemons into lemonade. There were several times when I was working on a project only to be informed that the project had been put on hold indefinitely. While initially frustrated by this I came to realize that even thought it was disappointing that these projects never went to completion, I was developing and refining important skills. I realized it was important to take on a positive outlook to every project I approached to ensure I kept putting my best foot forward.
