J&J Design Digital Signage
Johnson & Johnson Intern Project
Timeline: 8 weeks
Role: UI/UX Designer & Brand Designer
Tools: Figma, Mural, Notion, Powerpoint
Team: Sophia Geanacopoulos, Bryce Yao, Navya Salwan
As part of Johnson & Johnson’s Summer Professional Program, we were tasked with a collaborative intern project to redesign the digital signage content and system for both viewers and content managers that would be implementing this new system in Korbyt. In our team of four interns, my responsiblities included conducting user research & synthesizing findings, wireframing, designing new elements for and streamlining the current brand system, and creating a playbook of instructions for content managers.
The combination of various communication tools and the hybrid WFH/in-person work model creates both confusion and a lack of connection in the workplace.
PROBLEM
In light of the pandemic, people’s expectations of the workplace have changed dramatically, causing J&J to rethink what “the workplace” really means—spaces of hospitality and wellbeing, just like people’s homes. However, the combination of remote and in-office work creates challenges for team creativity, morale, and happiness.
How might we…
utilize a digital signage platform to create a better connected, more communicative workplace environment?
create a smooth and intuitive user-experience on the back-end for content managers as well as the front-end?
create a platform that’s relevant and useful to people within different functions across the company?
infuse our environments with elements of joy and comfort as well as functional necessities?
My team was responsible for tackling these challenges for J&J’s research, science, and laboratory locations across North America. We were additionally constrained with ensuring the digital signage could be implemented in Korbyt, J&J’s CMS system.
Create a fluid and scalable content strategy to implement with an elevation of J&J’s current brand identity.
SOLUTION
After in-depth research and testing, we concluded that there were three concerns we needed to focus on:
user experience & relevance of the target audience
user experience of the content managers implementing within Korbyt
organization and scalability of the content strategy itself
Our solution tackles all three areas, with our final deliverables consisting of content templates with examples, a Figma playbook that guides content managers through Figma, using the templates, and implementing them into Korbyt, as well as a business strategy for training, implementation, and cost.
Our final deliverables consisted of refined content templates within Figma for content managers to utilize, as well as visual indicators and instructions of how the templates should be integrated with Korbyt’s functions. Along with the templates themselves, examples of populated screens and a library of assets and custom typefaces were also there for ease of use. I also created a playbook that provides guidance on the brand guidelines, content strategy, and hierarchy of the templates, along with the basics of navigating through Figma. We felt that Figma was the best space for the templates and playbook to live in so it could continue to evolve and change with the company's guidelines and endeavors as needed.
FINAL DELIVERABLES
PLAYBOOK
This project was introduced to us in the beginning of the program and was, after that, completely hands-off. As a team, we worked collaboratively to create our own schedule, deadlines, and timeline, as well as balance our own individual, main tasks with this project.
OVERVIEW
For our research phase, we conducted both secondary and primary research. Our secondary research consisted of desk research and analogous case studies of Korbyt, the digital signage platform that would be used, and other similar content management systems. I created a system to organize the types of sources for desk research in our shared Notion, which included analogous cases for reference, relevant research, and the psychology of signage and reading signage.
SECONDARY RESEARCH
Our primary research consisted of surveys and user interviews of both employees in R&D/science functions and content managers/strategists for Johnson & Johnson's current digital signage systems. We then affinity mapped all our research in Mural and generated insights based on our research, which then led us to our user archetypes and how-might-we opportunities.
PRIMARY RESEARCH
We affinity mapped and synthesized all our research in Mural and generated insights based on our research, which then led us to our user archetypes and how-might-we opportunities.
INSIGHTS
Because our project requirements involved both the front-end users and back-end content managers, we conducted research with both groups, formulating two distinct user archetypes that would guide our design process.
USER ARCHETYPES
In our designing and prototyping phase, we began with a content strategy, dividing content into buckets and organizing it based on global and local communications. Since a lot of our research findings indicated the types of communication employees received that were important and meaningful were able to be categorized, we did so for the ease of the content manager who would be curating and delivering this news. Additionally, users on the front-end would be able to easily distinguish the priority and type of information being delivered based on a minimal number of visuals and color.
CONTENT STRATEGY
We then designed initial wireframes using our content strategy, dividing and organizing layouts between global and local communications, and mocked up a few key screens for user testing and feedback. I proposed an addition to Johnson & Johnson’s current brand identity to introduce the idea of shape language and rounded shapes as a way to soften the overall corporate feel and bring some more joy and playfulness visually.
WIREFRAMING
We conducted two rounds of user testing through Zoom, improving based on feedback after both rounds, with both content managers and lab/science/RXD employees.
USER TESTING
Going into this project was very daunting, as it was a project with a scope completely unfamiliar to me. I’ve mostly been used to digital solutions being for web or mobile applications, and I knew almost nothing about laboratory or research functions. However, I felt that being in a team was really helpful, as even though none of us had in-depth knowledge, we were able to work at building our knowledge with different perspectives and encouraging each other, which made the project much less daunting.
Looking back, if we were able to, it would have helped our project a lot to actually visit some of the sites and perhaps shadow some of the researchers in their day-to-day. With more time, I would have also suggested testing the displays within the Johnson & Johnson Design building for a few days to gather observational data and user feedback physically. Overall, my team and I are proud of what we were able to accomplish in a short of amount of time, especially considering we all had other main duties to take care of during our internship.
REFLECTION