Situation

The consulting business is based on knowledgeable employees who serve clients to perform better. The consultants have to be up-to-date about current development, best practices, and future trends. It is essential to extract learnings from past projects, research, and other thought leaders. Transferring knowledge and building synergies will help to save valuable time.

Challenge

When researching a topic, the researcher might not even know what they are searching for. Would it not be great if an AI suggested related search topics? The client is a huge firm with consulting projects across all industries. Often similar projects have already been conducted. Ideally, employees could easily find synergies between related research topics and their authors.

“The challenge is not how to keep useful information, but rather how to discard all the useless."
Bjørn Kirkerud, 1993

Solution

The idea arose to build a tool based on a knowledge graph, which allowed an explorative approach to search for content. The user can search for keywords, and s/he will see related topics linked to the original keyword. The lines in-between indicate how strong the relationship is.

I supported my colleague Christian Greisinger and this team with the Design Thinking approach. We reviewed different use case approaches and decided on a rough outline for the first pilot. Then we organized the user stories for the priority use case and identified feature gain creators and pain relievers for the new semantic research application.



Another important UX topic is related to an organized User Interface (UI). The data needs to be consumable. To achieve this, filtering, drill-down, zoom-in, and highlighting options help inspect different granularity levels. The commands need to be clear and follow familiar patterns.
There are more exciting challenges to solve with a complex data application that is more related to the backend - accessing different APIs, the data model - how to reduce errors, how to interpret keywords that use the same word but mean something different, etc.

Design Thinking workshop in Jan 2020 - Silent brainstorming

Feature ideation

In January 2020, we conducted a Design Thinking training where we ideated further use cases for the project. A special thanks to Janina Müller and Hans Hertel for training the team of twenty Design Thinkers with me, and to Christian Greisinger, the topic owner of the innovation project.

The project is still ongoing.