What is a transversal project and what type of issues do they raise? I propose to use 3 examples to illustrate the nature of these projects.
- European Telco online presence:
We were recently involved in the redesign of the online presence of a large European Telco. Our client is organised in customer segments, i.e. Private Customers, Small & Medium Enterprises (SME) and Large Enterprises. A separate silo manages each segment. Having three separate and different online experiences is not always the best solution, yet ensuring a seamless online experience, be it only at corporate navigation and identity level, is all but trivial and requires solid transversal project streams.
For example, customers shopping online in the SME silo could neither continue their purchase nor checkout in the Private silo; they needed to checkout first, or empty their shopping basket and eventually logout before buying an accessory only available in the other shop; an experience that you would not accept in a real store. We solved this with an elegant solution and by building bridges between silos.
Such cases happen regularly for all kind of good reasons, and are often linked to silo-driven mentalities, and lack of a common vision and roadmap for the corporation's online presence.
- Small European state Web Site ergonomics:
We recently completed a strategic project for a European state that asked us to rethink the ergonomics and user interactions of its entire online presence. The current graphical layout dates back to 2006 and needs to be renewed.
Each government has a series of online objectives that depend on how it sees itself, its reason of being and role. This added a very interesting touch of philosophy and political science to the project. Western Europe has a strong democratic culture and some of the goals of our governments are to serve their citizens and demonstrate that tax income is well spent. Other goals are to inform and educate the population; and of course there is, internally, a very wide range of opinions on this and the priorities.
Our client is composed of seven main departments plus one chancellery; each composed of a myriad of offices and sub-departments. At the end of the day, the question was the following: how should all state bodies and authorities work together, communicate to citizens and serve them online using transversal navigation patterns, whilst offering a consistent, good, flexible and modern user experience, and control the associated costs?
As in the previous example, online users are not interested in the organisation behind a service. A citizen landing on a government's web site is primarily interested in solving a problem, complete a duty or obtain precise information on a certain topic. She or he should not be required to understand the state's organisation to fulfil these objectives.
However, many web sites still impose silo-driven user experiences today. Online transversal projects as we see them aim to improve the user experience on cross-organisational web sites.
- Nokia phones user experience:
Nokia used to offer by far the best mobile phone user experience for a long time, but since the appearance of Apple and Android smartphones with renewed user interfaces, Nokia shares have plummeted back to the level they where in 1998 when Nokia was on its way to dominate that market.
Four years ago, my Nokia phone's main screen (Symbian-based) had one icon called media and another one called gallery. I asked a friend working at Nokia the reason for such a confusing experience. He told me it had to with internal politics, departments or groups not collaborating well, wanting to be visible on the main screen, eventually incapable of building a coherent experience. I am not sure how true this is and how much it explains Nokia's recent history, but I find it the best illustration for this post.
These 3 examples show how interrelated corporate organisations and digital projects can be. In a recent post we showed how commoditized technology combined with new use cases play a role here too while opening a world of new opportunities. In our next article of this series we share some more information on how we help our clients exploiting these opportunities
