KLM User Experience
How can we design a (c)lean, user-centric, up to date website for SCO employees, which improves the user’s experience?
I did my graduation project at the KLM Safety & Compliance Organization (SCO). The SCO has its own page on the KLM intranet system which is meant to grant access to safety documents and information for safety and compliance employees. However, due to the bad user experience employees tend to avoid the page and find a workaround so that they do not need to use it. During this project I researched why the user experience is bad, how to improve it and use those findings to design a new page that employees want to use.
About the Safety and Compliance Organization (SCO)
The Safety & Compliance organization is a division within KLM, who check new regulations and legislation worldwide, making sure KLM is following the rules by auditing other divisions and other airports. Besides preventative actions, the SCO is also reactive: investigating reported safety incidents to figure out how to improve safety.
The problem
Starting the project, I did an analysis of the intranet page and conducted preliminary interviews with SCO employees to gather their feedback about the website. This helped me understand the current state of the user experience and what is going wrong. A cascading multitude of factors brought the website to its current state. It started off when the SCO was formed and created their intranet page. This intranet page was made by employees who had no experience in web design, or anything related to it. This sets the basis for the layout of the page. Over the years more and more content is added to the page without being maintained properly. Bringing us to the current state, an intranet page that overwhelms users with information and makes it difficult for users to access documents.
The consequences
Because of the bad user experience employees tend to avoid the page as much as possible by downloading the needed documents on their laptop or PC, which increases the chance of using outdated information. Which brings us to the most important consequence:
not adhering to regulations, policies, and/or legislation. From a company perspective, not adhering to regulations, policies and/or legislation could result in actual incidents that put people's lives and company assets at risk. But it could also result in massive fines, costing substantial amounts of money that could have been put towards other projects, investments, and developments. Furthermore, it could also have a negative effect on the reputation of KLM. Which in turn makes consumers trust the company less. Especially because KLM brands itself as being the safest airline in the business.
The process
After identifying the problem, I continued the project by researching the user group, using website traffic data and feedback from interviews with SCO employees. Results showed that almost all of the users are SCO employees. From there I gathered user needs and the product objective to make a list of requirements and criteria the new design should adhere to. After setting criteria and listing the requirements, I could start creating concepts and testing these in Figma (a program where you can design interactive concepts) and in a live testing environment on the intranet.
Home page, hidden behind this are 40 more pages filled with content, and some of those pages haven't been edited since 2019.
The first design
Desing one was made in the intranet environment using the web development tool kit that was integrated into it. This new design showed that it relieved all the problems the old design created but it barely improved the user experience. This is because this system is outdated and therefore created technical limitations. Meaning that not all the criteria, system requirements user’s needs could be met. Making the first design more of a reordering of content than an actual new UX design.
The second design
Having no technical limitations meant that so many more design options became available. This design focusses on giving the user control on what content they see when they access the page and customize it to their specific needs. The most important user need is quick access to documents. That is why the first feature designed for this concept is the 'follow' document feature. This allows users to follow documents so that they can instantly open them when visiting the page and receive notifications when they get updated. One user might use a certain document very often and thus make it the first thing he sees. Another user might need to look up open meeting rooms a lot and therefore add a tile to let him do that efficiently. Users showed a lot of excitement and enthusiasm testing the website and thinking about other opportunities.
The implementation
Sadly, because of budget constraints the first design most likely won’t be used, instead the SCO will create a completely bare page adding only the minimum amount of content. This is also one of the reasons for creating the second design.
The second design will be presented to the SCO as a way to show what the page could look like and what kind of improvements it would bring to the SCO.