Background

Takeda’s project management portal (ePPM) was created to meet the needs of transparency of financial impacts and milestone progresses. It manages over 10,000 projects and supports more than 40 (manufacturing) sites and functions. The portal is widely utilized, and users have grown to 3,000 portfolio and project managers.

“[For the initial launch, we] went with showing all the data [the system] had with an okay UI.,” says the portal owner, Shane McCarroll, Head of Project and Portfolio Management Office. In the course of a couple of years, the portal has expanded its functionality. “The tool was built by 5 team members so there was a limitation on how much we could do to support that many users within the given timeframe. UI/UX took secondary place.”

While Shane and his team received overall positive feedback, he was aware that some users were having difficulties navigating the tool. To find a solution Takeda teamed up with Infozone Intelligence for guidance and to perform a UX audit to identify quick wins to improve their UI and increase usability.

Approach

The SUS Survey: Leveraging the SUS Survey was essential to freely hear users’ experiences from using the project management portal.

Understanding personas: Grouping users by their characteristics
was crucial to understand their use cases and to identify directions of where to improve and how.

Acknowledging survey scores: Score-based survey revealed a patttern that highlighted areas where users did experience difficulties.

Analyzing free-text responses: Quantitative and qualitative analysis of free-text responses is a shortcut to discover potential
improvement areas.

Results

From the UX Audit, Takeda’s frequent users in over 20 countries, both new and long-term, showed high scores in usability and learnability, but they discovered that infrequent users were in need of additional support as they found the tool complex to use. The critical area to improve turned out to be learnability, especially for non-English speakers. From the free-text responses it was clear that users liked the accessibility of the data the most, but they wanted to see an improvement in making the data entry process easier.

Takeda decided to continue working with Infozone’s UI/UX team to redesign their existing portal. The teams’ familiarity with the functionality of both the portal as well as the outcome of the UX Audit with desired changes and users’ feedback made for an easy transition and quick turnaround time. Shane mentions “[The UX Audit] helped to hone in on focus areas where we were not performing well, where the end user struggled in navigation and process flow”. By presenting the outcome with prioritized actions from the audit, he also mentions that the result helped his team secure an additional budget to make enhancements to the portal.

Conclusion

A well-executed UX Audit opens the door to users’ perspectives of interacting with a specific tool. As the audit includes both a quantitative and qualitative analysis, a broader understanding can be gained. As a developer or creator of a tool, it is hard to see all aspects of the solution as you know it too well. A third-party audit can help facilitate open and honest feedback from users that normally would not reach the developers responsible for the tool. The additional review of the tool by UX experts can pinpoint issues and lead to suggestions and recommendations that are highly actionable.

To learn more about the benefits of UX Audits and methods, visit our UX Audit page.