Analytics Advisor

DIY Data Analytics Education

Context

My Role

Analytics Advisor is the education platform provided to suppliers of The Home Depot as part of the Supplier Analytics Program. The program is a suite of data analysis tools that drive business growth through collaboration and shared insights between The Home Depot and its suppliers.

Identified Challenges

Content Designer - Learning Experience Designer.

As a content designer I identified this gap in our user experience and initiated this project from a UX, research and content perspective. As the project grew I have been joined by a cross functional group of leaders and team members across product, sales, support, and communications who serve as subject matter experts and collaborators on the project.

Constraints

Approach

Any solution would have to function within an existing zendesk theme as well as the limitations of our existing architecture and tools.

The pilot project also needed to release within 6 months of the initiation of the formal team

Suppliers have access to varying levels of support and training, with some suppliers reliant on self service resources.
Suppliers require regular education as features release, goals change, and tools evolve.
A significant number of suppliers who rely on self service showed lower understanding and usage of resources and tools.
Existing resources were unclear in user navigation and focused only on how to use tools not why or when.
Suppliers found existing resources too long.

As a team we leveraged a variety of methods to understand our users including:

Journey and site mapping
Task analysis
Satisfaction and contextual surveys
User personas
A/B testing
Usage data analysis

The Process

It would be easy to say I followed the design thinking process perfectly - I didn't - luckily the process is adaptable and iterative so we iterated.

I centered the design thinking process in all my work but like most design processes everything wasn't perfect. Due to the complexities of the pilot project and the need to release on a tight deadline with a small team we needed to take liberties.

I put a significant portion of our time into empathising and defining focusing on building a good basis of research first. I was able to do much of this in the early stages myself prior to the addition of other team members utilizing existing research from our program personas, app design focus groups and our bi-annual satisfaction surveys to establish patterns across user groups and verify that my hypothesized gaps were correct amongst targeted user groups.

Once cross-functional team members were added we worked on defining my hypotheses into the 5 key challenges I mentioned above and ideating on possible solutions. At this point we designed a usability study and contextual interviews to understand where our users were hitting barriers in the tools, but also in their own knowledge, their ability to use our resources, and where their business goals and ours aligned. It was at this point that we were able to determine our pilot topic for the educational course.