Neil Wehrle

Avaya Global Research
Avaya is a global telecommunications equipment provider based in New Jersey. Avaya faced enormous challenges after being spun off from Lucent unifying far-flung web properties used by its business partners as it downsized its direct sales force.

Avaya needed concrete direction for its business partner and high-profile customer sites. Understanding what they really needed from Avaya, beyond great products, would help them rationalize decisions around site features.

My Role
I had been involved in user research for Avaya for nearly two years conducting interviews with customers and testing new web sites with employees. We interviewed business partners to inform the creation of user profiles and then used those as benchmarks for testing solutions.

An interview in Scotland with a bank IT Director.

Explorations
During the development of a clear direction of the site, we needed a way to frame our research findings and then to prioritize potential features. To help us think through what would be useful to the target audiences, we created profiles and detailed scenarios around typical business problems they faced.

A highlight from one of the scenarios

We also developed clear prioritization matrices that helped Avaya understand the rigor and rationale behind the recommendations we made.

Solution
The site launched as one of the most successful for Avaya to date. Business partners raved about the improved access to important information the site provided.
One of the keys to this success was the inclusion of usability testing we conducted on a designed prototype with business partners. Testing highlighted many of the ongoing concerns partners had, while de-politicizing many of the needed solutions internally at Avaya.

A highlight from the usability testing report.