Project Overview
Welcome!
This website covers one team's 2008 Masters of Human-Computer Interaction capstone project at Carnegie Mellon University. It provides insight into the research, design and evaluation our interdisciplinary team has done over the course of seven months. Our client for this project was SAP's Design Services Team, which is part of the Office of the CEO at SAP and was created to advocate design-led innovation within SAP and with SAP's customers as well as to drive design thinking into all aspects of the SAP strategy.
The goal of this project was to create a social tool which enables companies to effectively attract and engage the next generation of workers by connecting people, places and resources within the enterprise to optimize the way work gets done and knowledge is shared.
Based on the insights we gathered from our user research in the spring, we narrowed the project's focus down to the area of knowledge sharing within the enterprise. We identified specific needs of millennials pertaining to knowledge sharing, which we subsequently validated with millennials currently in the workforce.
To address those needs, we followed a design process in which we continuously evaluated our design ideas by conducting user tests with low to high fidelity prototypes. At the end of this refinement process stood a novel knowledge sharing solution, which, unlike other existing solutions on the market, does not try to directly store the knowledge itself but rather enables employees to connect to their co-workers who are knowledgeable in an area of expertise of their interest. This system, which we call Forté, provides a concise workflow for looking up people knowledgeable in a specific area and determining if and how they can be contacted based on whether they prefer to be contacted by e-mail, instant messenger, phone or face-to-face.
Our final solution is compromised of a desktop widget which allows quick access to the system's essential functionality of setting communication preferences, searching for knowledgeable people and referring back to recent searches. Within the search results, users can quickly determine a person's availability based on the person's communication preferences and calendar status as well as their association with the expertise the user searched for. The system also visualizes the social connection between the user and all of the search results. A visual expertise browser allows users to look through related knowledge areas and provides a helpful alternative to manual searches. Additionally, a full profile page for each person can offer more specific information about that person.
Forté helps to motivate talent by encouraging collaboration across teams by utilizing millennials' propensity for technology and an informal work environment. While being primarily intended for millennial workers, it can also help managers and HR to identify talent and thus staff projects with the right people as well as discover talent and expertise gaps within the company.
