Deloitte Greenhouse: United States

The client’s challenge

A prominent health agency of the U.S. Government wished to develop an intranet portal for its workforce, which included executives, researchers, scientists, and administrators. The agency’s information technology department had a short turnaround to get the portal up and running, so it turned to Deloitte for help putting its design process on the right track.

Deloitte’s solution

A team of digital design specialists from Deloitte U.S. planned a Greenhouse session to tackle the key challenge of the project: meeting the disparate needs of the agency’s many different professionals. The session employed leading-edge design thinking methods, taking full advantage of the Greenhouse’s studio-like setting. 

The Deloitte team opened the session by explaining their approach and providing examples of the intended outputs: a set of “personas,” representing typical users of site. The personas would enable Deloitte’s designers to identify information and collaboration features for the portal that would appeal to multiple user types.

Deloitte’s facilitators led the client team through exercises to understand how different categories of the agency’s employees support its mission. As the client team shared their ideas and insights, a graphic facilitator took down their thoughts in pictures and words. These diagrams reflected and enriched the client team’s understanding of what information and collaboration features the agency’s workforce might benefit from.

The graphic facilitator also played a key role in starting to form the user personas during the session itself, by developing an initial schematic for organizing the attributes and information needs of the portal’s users into role-based groups. This gave the agency’s team the opportunity to consider and shape the personas as they came together.

Impact on client’s business

The half-day that the agency’s team spent in the Greenhouse left the Deloitte U.S. design team with enough input to complete the personas in further creative workshops. The resulting three personas won the approval of the CIO and key project stakeholders, who appreciated the creativity and user-centered approach of Deloitte’s design process. Deloitte U.S. has since used the personas to develop prototypes for the employee portal and is continuing to refine these as the basis for building the intranet portal.