Headshift

Headshift was engaged by the National College for Leadership of School and Children's Services to provide this leadership development organisation with a new online social networking and collaboration solution. The College's online strategy was ambitious and its online provision comprised a number of components, integrated to varying degrees, inclu... ding its public website, its Learning Management System, an extensive collection of valuable content, and registration, enrolment and admissions systems from third-party providers. Given this extensive stack of legacy systems, Headshift's solution needed to perform well as a stand-alone environment, but also integrate seamlessly with these various components through solutions provided by the College's managed service partner, British Telecommunications, and its contractors. Headshift's social networking and collaboration solution for the College emerged from an extensive period of business analysis, user experience, and social experience design consulting, carried out on a collaborative basis with a high level of active client participation and access to stakeholders. Our user-centred consulting methodology on this project enabled us to gather a significant amount of evidence relating to user profiles and needs, user behaviour and motivation, interaction styles, business and personal use cases, workflows, and functional requirements. In turn, this ensured that the product we developed had the best possible chance of being taken up and used, thus forming an essential networking, learning and knowledge sharing platform free of the typical constraints of 'traditional' enterprise software. Most of the recommendations emerging from our initial consulting work were accepted - and in some cases, enthusiastically endorsed - by senior College stakeholders, including Board members, who stated that we had managed to "really get under the skin of our users". According to the College, our social networking and collaboration solution "will be used in a flexible way by the ...Read More