christopher yee

For recent case studies, contact me at chris@c-yee.com

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  Intranet Case Study

  A case study of Fortune 500 companies and the transitional pains they come across in their intranet's digital strategy, information architecture and user experience when incorporating responsive web design (RWD), executive mandates, enterprise campaigns and third-party vendors in an effort to support their employees needs across devices.
  
  We would first ask several questions in our requirments gathering:
  • Who are your employees?
  • As a business, how do you make money?
  • How connected are they and how much does this vary regionally?
  • What content do you want accessible to your employees?
  • What content do your employees want access to? - This is often hugely overlooked by large organizations.
  
  We talked and surveyed employees that range from associate to executive and in our research, we found the issue not to be quantity of content - as large organizations typically have plenty of content - but the quality and searchability of said content.
  
  In working with Communications and IT groups we looked to streamline information architecture, taxonomy, communications strategy, content strategy and digital strategy to create a non-organizational structure - as these may change due to outside factors like transformation - but a structure driven by the major departments and businesses.

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  Sunway Tea

  A NYC startup focusing on tea distribution, where the primary issues we faced were those of marketing, demographics and distribution chain.
  
  The question of demographics strongly influenced our business decisions as well as those of user experience. The market in the United States was a narrow one; as tea has not had the same boom that coffee or fine spirits have had but suffers from the same issues - your audience either:
  a) doesn't know, doesn't care or hasn't developed the palette to differentiate the subtleties between high-end and low-end products or...
  b) they do know and can afford the mid-high luxury sector of your product type
  
  So how do we address these issues?
  • We looked to products that have similar issues (dark chocolate, coffee, fine spirits), as we were a varied bunch but we all had varying developed palettes.
  • A strong supply and distribution chain were created with domesitc growers and our business teams.
  • I worked with developers and designers both internationally and domestically to workout technological and digital logistics.
  
  In the end we performed a soft-launch to which we recieved great feedback however were borderline in meeting our expectations. It was a great learning experience in grassroots startups and the myriad of issues a lean team needs to account for.

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  The Daily

  With the talented individuals at The Daily, we worked with Apple to create the first daily iPad publication. In addition to working with early agile project management, user experience and usability research methodoligies we were exploring a whole new medium - the key was in research, analytics and a holistic approach to digital publications.
  
  • In our research we needed identify what kind of news organization we were to be and what news to focus on.
  • Who's our audience in relation to the platform we're using and the content we deliver.
  • For me, how did this apply to my own department - sports - and how would we differentiate our news section from the others.
  • How was this new medium to be used, would we have cross-platform support?
  • How were we to manage a daily production design schedule with something as volatile as news?
  • How would we incorporate social media?
  
  One of the earliest items we began working on were standardized templates - similar to print publications - but we needed to accomodate layouts for both horizontal and vertical layouts during the pre-RWD (responsive web design) era, we looked to early AWD (adaptive web design). These layouts not only needed to be adaptive in their regular content but also in their interactive content. These features needed to be heavily tested and on a daily production cycle, sometimes in mere hours if it was breaking news. These templates saved much time for the bulk of the non-featured news coverage - over 60% of the publication - and were later adopted to all sections beyond sports allowing production designers to focus on the more elaborate and interacive featured pieces.

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  IFC

  With a digital team at IFC, we focused on supporting IFC's shows as well as featured coverage of events - like SXSW and the Tribeca Film Festival.
  
  The above is an example of an early AWD/RWD page using a 2-column layout that would serve as a template for IFC.com

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