Making Expertise Location Magical
A comprehensive, easy-to-use people data tool, brings a modern, consumer-like experience to enterprise software.
For the past 15 years, it’s been my responsibility to bring delightful experiences to the Walt Disney Company. My favorite example of this is an expertise location tool called Rostr—a simple, intuitive interface that allows employees to find each other by name, title, location and expertise.
The Problem
When this project began, the Walt Disney Company was still handing out paper phone books. A consolidated digital people directory existed, but the end-user experience was very limited. It only supported database-type queries—such as lastname, firstname—and required the user to know either the person’s full name, or at least a portion of their last name. Additionally, there was no keyword search capability, so finding employees by other attributes such as skills or expertise was not possible. Furthermore, employees photos and org relationship information was not available.
Early user feedback indicated the tool was very popular and valuable because it was fairly comprehensive, and so much better than the paper phone book. However, users desired a more modern experience with greater ease of use.
Goals
- Create an intuitive and easy to use people search experience.
- Provide context around an individual, including their expertise and connection to other individuals or teams.
- Modernize the UI to improve engagement and trust.
Rostr was one of the very first responsive, consumer-like apps for the Disney enterprise.
What I did
I designed a fast and easy search experience that allows employees to find each other, and allows employees to augment company-provided information with custom attributes, including summary, expertises and their own photo.
As lead UX designer on this project, I also:
- Performed user research and testing including surveys, virtual interviews and in-situation observation.
- Developed sketches, wireframes and prototypes.
- Defined all the front end code (CSS, HTML, and JavaScript) via live code prototyping.
- Included cast members with disabilities in the design process.
- Performed accessibility testing and remediation to ensure compliance with accessibility standards.
Process
Rostr is about people, so we always talked directly to users to understand their issues and desires. We conducted user interviews in-person and remote and observed Cast Members using the product at work in a variety of situations and locations. For example, we learned that employees working in edit bays, or studios prefer to have dark mode.
Research uncovered the most appropriate location for displaying personal pronouns.
From the beginning we always wanted to provide context around individuals. Org relationships, proved to be invaluable to end users. We created a system that let employees add their own custom data fields, such as expertise or current and past projects.
Outcomes
Finding the right person with the right expertise at Disney is now easier than ever. Rostr allows employees to quickly locate anyone across the various business segments, and has become integral to many critical workflows throughout the company.
Rostr also provides an API that allows people data to be integrated into a number of other enterprise applications.
With a clean, simple and mobile-first approach, Rostr is still one of the most popular and beloved experiences within Disney today.