Application Design mixing UX, Learning and Knowledge Management Methodologies

Nowadays some organizations are becoming aware that they are knowledge organizations, even if they have a tangible product. They know that their people are the key factor. So companies start cross-company projects to improve Learning, others are knowledge management projects to create communities of practice that share information and best practices; and others are aimed to (re)design the intranet in order to make information easier to find and to add Social tools.

The ultimate goal of these kinds of projects is to help people work better, learn from successes and failures and avoid reinventing the wheel. If we are going to design (or redesign) an application to achieve that, why not go a step further than only focusing on UX and mix in some Learning and Knowledge management methodologies?

This presentation will include details of a real-life case: A public organization (the water agency of Catalonia, Spain) which wanted to improve the information desk service to citizens. We initiated and supported a community of practice with a wide group of final users (government employees that ranged from lawyers to civil and geographical engineers to citizen-oriented desk clerks). We helped this group to design the online application that allow them to collect specialized information and share it with the information desk clerks.

We aplyed a cocktail of methodologies:
from Learning: a redefinition of the learning and training practices
from Knowledge Management: creating a team feeling to help information sharing
from UX: UCD techniques to design the content creation process and the tool to create, edit and share that content.

This presentation is not about new methodologies, but about an innovative way of applying existing methodologies.