Designing for the people behind the product

Arcadis is a global design and consultancy company. I worked with its Learning & Development team to help define the requirements for a new internal learning platform.

On the surface, the project was about replacing an internal website.

The team needed somewhere employees could discover learning resources, understand how they fitted into their development plans and enrol on courses.

Before thinking about screens or features, we spent time understanding the different people who would interact with the platform and the jobs they were trying to get done.

As we mapped those journeys, something became obvious.

We’d identified the people who would consume the content, but not the people who would create it.

The platform couldn’t exist without someone maintaining courses, updating information and managing the content behind the scenes. Until then, those needs simply hadn’t been part of the conversation.

That changed the scope of the project.

Alongside the employee experience, we defined the workflows, information architecture and wireframes for the administrative side of the platform, ensuring the people responsible for keeping it running had the tools they needed.

Until then, nobody had designed for the people responsible for keeping the platform alive.

Curious how experiences like this have shaped my approach?

Many of the principles on my approach page were shaped by projects like this, where stepping back often revealed a different problem to solve.