Focus Brands Research Repository

Summary

Restaurant franchisor and operator Focus Brands currently manages thousands of restaurants across 8 major brands. However, they were witnessing redundant research being carried out across the various brand teams, resulting in additional expenditures of time and money. My team worked with Focus Brands in designing a central enterprise research repository system to provide employees with easy access to research files across the entire company.

Problem Space

This project was conducted in partnership with Focus Brands, a restaurant brand development company that currently owns such brands as Carvel, Cinnabon, Moe’s Southwest Grill, and McAlister’s Deli, among others. Our partners at Focus Brand came to us for help in identifying a potential method of consolidating research across Focus Brands into a single repository that is accessible and easy to use by all potential stakeholders across the company. At the time that this project was introduced, research across Focus Brands was divided across multiple different tools and platforms from local network directories to cloud storage and Microsoft Sharepoint servers. This situation made it difficult to identify existing relevant research within the company and created conditions for redundant research and uninformed decision-making, which ultimately results in additional costs of time, money, and human effort.

User Research

Interviews (Semi-Structured)

To understand the various potential users at Focus Brands and their relationship with research access at the company, we designed a semi-structured interview to be carried out with six different participants that occupied different roles across both teams and departments within the company. Our questions were designed specifically to target the following topics:

• Contextual Definitions of Research

• Interaction with existing research storage systems

• Cross-team communication and collaboration

• Existing constraints on research storage and access

Remote Observation

We were also able to conduct remote observations of users interacting with their existing research storage systems and thinking aloud as they worked through their own research discovery processes. This helped us learn user motivations behind performing certain actions and existing habits that incline the users towards specific tools, features, and actions in order to achieve their work goal, essentially familiarizing us with various mental models around research discovery and management within the company.

Task Analysis

Based on the work processes we observed during our remote think aloud observations, we organized the various user behaviors used to go about retrieving and sharing research files in a hierarchical task analysis. The goal of this process was to identify the common and necessary steps that users across the various teams and departments at Focus Brands go through to achieve their research work goals. It also helped us identify existing user needs and pain points from interacting with the different file storage platforms across the company.

Affinity Mapping

We organized the data gathered in the interviews and remote observations into an affinity map to identify overarching common themes and behaviors shared between users. This mapping process also allowed us to categorize the various needs and pain points identified in the task analysis into larger categories, so that we can design more economically in the way we address the various user needs. Affinity mapping was also helpful in allowing us to identify understated shared characteristics between different users as well as potential outliers that may not relate directly to the research repository system but could contribute to particularly impactful design decisions.

Empathy Mapping

In order to establish a base understanding of the user group we would be designing for, we then organized the data we had gathered across our user research activities into an empathy map of quotes, thoughts, feelings and actions that characterize the common user. Based off the diverse set of data we had collected, it became evident that it would be helpful if we understood our users across two characterizations. One group of users clearly prioritized speed of access over organization, while the other valued an organized system over speed.

Findings

All of these research activities helped us identify the following insights on the current state of research storage and access at Focus Brands:

• Lack of existing guidelines - Standard practice guidelines around file naming, saving, and organizing were often absent within brand teams and across the company. This makes the process of searching for relevant files difficult, tedious, and stressful for employees.

• Interpersonal process - Since files across the company were not easily searchable, many employees rely on their peer network to help them find pre-existing research that was relevant to their own goals.

• Access management - There was a lot of shared frustration between employees around the lack of standard practice surrounding managing access to files. Several employees were confused as to why certain users were given access to files that should be restricted. At the same time, employees were often frustrated with the process of requesting access to directory folders.

• Juggling between platforms - The variety of file storage platforms used across the company was often seen as a deterrent by employees in the research discovery process.

• File context and relevance - The most time-consuming part of the research process for many employees was understanding the context of a file and its relevance to the user’s own research goals. Employees are often left frustrated when they go through the process of opening a file from an unfamiliar platform only to find that the information within that file was either devoid of any context or ultimately irrelevant to their needs.

  After condensing our user research into various analytical frameworks, we synthesized our findings into a list of user needs and potential design implications of those needs.

Ideation

Focusing on these user needs, each team member sketched what they would imagine to be a potential solution to the issue of research storage and access at Focus Brands. Once all of our sketches were complete, we reconvened and discussed the various features within our individual designs.

Some of the sketched features that we had identified as potentially useful included an advanced asset search that found relevant files based on specified criteria, integration with the network address book for file sharing, adding file metadata information on new research files to assist identification, and automated file organization. We gathered additional feedback on our sketches from users at Focus Brands to inform which features were particularly useful and guide the final design.

Design

While we had originally intended to create a brand new centralized research repository system, it became clear that the various existing tools and behaviors currently connected to the research storage and discovery process would make consolidation and onboarding onto a new system difficult for many Focus Brands employees. Therefore, we decided to design our solution as a set of add-on features for their existing integration with Microsoft SharePoint. We created prototype flows in Adobe XD around four specific user actions: adding new research files, searching for existing research, managing file access, and organizing the file directories.

Adding New Files

We designed our solution around the idea that metadata attached to files upon addition to the platform would assist in identifying relevant files during searches and organization. However, while could potentially be automated, we designed a system that would allow file owners to override how a new research file is identified based on relevant metadata tags, as well as the visibility of the file across different teams. This was implemented based off concerns we had heard from users around the accessibility of in-development research files and how a file is defined by the system based on contextual knowledge.

Searching

The users we spoke with all shared various behaviors that they used for searching for relevant research files such as looking up file names, file types, and date added/modified. We believe that we can strengthen these searching behaviors and improve the search results with the integration of file metadata tagging. In addition to more intelligent search functionality, search results can be quickly analyzed through a content preview window that appears upon hover.

Managing/Requesting File Access

While a file owner can manage file visibility and access permissions, we also recognized the need for a way for a user to request access from a file owner to a file they believe is potentially useful to them. This system allows users and file owners to communicate easily and manage access permissions all within the SharePoint directory.

Auto-Organization

There was shared frustration across the users we interacted with around the organization of files. Some users were frustrated by certain users not adhering to an file organization system, while others found file organization to be time-consuming and not worth the necessary effort. We aimed to leverage the metadata tagging system to automate the organization process and thus relieve users of some of the stress around creating and adhering to a common file organization system.

Usability Testing

We were able to conduct a task-based design evaluation of our prototype solution with four participant users from Focus Brands. In these evaluations, we asked users to directly interact with our prototype and think aloud while attempting to complete four tasks around the four key features of our design. Participant users were asked to complete a TLX survey after the completion of each individual task and a SUS survey at the completion of all tasks. Though our sample size was small, we were able to glean some valuable insights that informed potential improvements in our design for future iterations.

Improvement 1: Files Locked from Organizer

With the File Organizer, there was some shared concern that the utility will continually move files that the owner had deliberately put in a place that goes against the organizer’s framework of file organization. In order to prevent unnecessary movement of files, we have introduced a system where a file can be locked by the file owner to prevent it from being touched by the File Organizer. Locked files are indicated within the folder hierarchy in the Organizer window with a small lock placed in the bottom right of the folder icon.

Improvement 3: Notifications

A common point of feedback that we received from Focus Brand employees was that there needed to be some form of communication to the user of any changes being made to files and folders on the platform. To address this need, we plan on utilizing the existing notification system within the various file-sharing platforms to communicate any access requests sent to file owners as well as any changes in file location made by the file organizer tool.