A case study in seeding collaboration transformation with experience themes

Collaboration at Intel is currently in a stage of transformation with increased focus on using social computing and other technologies to boost collaboration and productivity. This transformation requires a shift in the services IT provides and a solid understanding of the expectations that employees have of both their technology and the larger environment in which collaboration happens. At the same time, we have been given the mandate to Be Bold, and Act Fast, leaving little time for upfront user research and requiring us as UX professionals to rethink how we enable project teams to be more effective within this new reality. One approach that is being used within IT to help product design teams move more quickly is experience themes, which package available user research for easier reuse. The collaboration portfolio has been an early adopter and used experience themes for the last year to help define the desired collaboration experience from upfront strategy and back-end architecture to the design of individual products. We will share learnings on how to best use these concepts and discuss the benefits of having a re-usable, over-arching experience vision in guiding product decision-making.