The Context
The Compliance team needed a way for employees to access frequently asked questions and information about the different Compliance departments.
The initial request appeared straightforward:
“We need a list of FAQs.”
Rather than immediately translating this requirement into a UI, I used stakeholder conversations to understand why employees needed the information and what they were expected to do with it.
The Problem
As I explored the requirement, it became clear that the problem wasn’t simply a lack of FAQs.
Employees needed to answer questions such as:
- What does each Compliance department do?
- Which department is relevant to my question?
- Where can I find the information I need?
- Who can I contact if I need further assistance?
- Where can I access the full documentation?
This changed the problem from:
“How do we display FAQs?”
to:
“How might we help employees understand Compliance and quickly find the right information or person?”
That was the key design shift.
Discovery
I worked with the stakeholder to understand:
Business need
The Compliance team needed an accessible channel for communicating information and directing employees towards the correct resources.
User need
Employees needed an easy way to understand Compliance and find relevant information without navigating through large amounts of documentation.
Existing resource
The complete documentation already existed on SharePoint.
This meant the employee application did not need to duplicate every piece of information.
Instead, it needed to become a clear entry point into the information ecosystem.
User Journeys
Design Direction
Rather than designing a long FAQ list, I structured the experience around:
Discover → Search → Understand → Act
The experience provides:
- FAQ search
- Department navigation
- Department descriptions
- Relevant FAQs
- Contact information
- External access to SharePoint documentation
The design principle
Don’t make users understand the organisation before they can find information. Help them understand the organisation as part of finding the information.
What I learned
The most important lesson from this project was that the first requirement isn’t always the actual problem.
The stakeholder asked for a feature.
The discovery process uncovered a broader user need.