TandemSeven

 "TandemSeven’s user research and design expertise was instrumental in helping us reach our 6-month target voluntary adoption goal of our Sharepoint portal in just 6 weeks. The team designed a highly personalized and simplified experience for all our staff and council members."

Jamie Joyce, VP Interactive Marketing
Girl Scouts of the USA

The Challenge
Beset by poor usability, meager functionality and low user affinity, Girl Scouts needed to replace its existing Online Council Network (OCN). Along with provisioning issues and lack of a robust Web content management capability, the OCN was expensive and challenging to maintain. Adding to the urgency of a new portal, Girl Scouts was in the midst of their first rebranding effort in 40 years. They needed a mechanism to present the new vision of Girl Scouts internally—headquarters staff and over 10,000 council members had to understand and embrace the new vision before it was rolled out to the world.

TandemSeven Solution
Girls Scouts partnered with TandemSeven to analyze user needs and design a new intranet and collaboration portal using Microsoft Sharepoint. TandemSeven’s team:

• Interviewed stakeholders and users to identify goals, tasks and needs
• Created a set of personas to summarize needs and attributes of typical users
• Developed scenarios describing how users may interact with the portal
• Designed annotated wireframes to show how frequently-used pages will work
• Created a compelling visual design that supports the new brand and culture
• Developed a supporting visual design style guide, describing all designs in detail.

The Results
TandemSeven's new design helped Girl Scouts achieve their six-month voluntary adoption rate goal in just six weeks. The visual design communicates the new Girl Scouts brand and shows the organization is innovative, fun and focused on the needs of the girls. Furthermore, the new Sharepoint portal helps headquarters staff and over 10,000 council members:

• Access information that is most important to them by providing personalized direct links on the main navigation
• Quickly and easily create shared spaces for project collaboration documents and discussions, invite specific users to join projects, and control the level of privacy of the projects
• Create less formal communities to discuss topics of common interest as well as descriptions of their councils and departments, including customized news.

Girl Scouts looks forward to rolling the portal out to over one million volunteers.