Rolta India: The User Experience Institutionalization Journey Rolta multinational organization headquartered in India, provides innovative solutions across high profile verticals such as defense, government, oil and gas, power, transportation, manufacturing, banking, financial services, and insurance in over 40 countries. Forbes Global ranked Rolta among the “Best 200 under a Billion” four times in six years. Their offerings are very diverse, and tend to focus on the latest technology making solutions feature rich, catering to a very wide set of end users, ranging from the extremely sophisticated high-end users to the not-so-tech-savvy, and everyone in between. The Challenge Rolta realized that their products need a standard, consistent, and contemporary user experience. They wanted users to identify uniquely Rolta products and solutions not just for their functionality, but also for the usability and experience. Lack of formal UX expertise within the organization was a challenge. Even though they were designing screens and menus, they had no foundation in fundamental scientific UX engineering concepts such as information architecture, navigation design, grid-based layouts, etc. Since Rolta is not a just a products company, but rather a provider of cutting-edge solutions to end users, this focus on user experience could not be a one-time effort. It needed to be an ongoing journey of developing a mature in-house UX capability. Human Factors International (HFI) was engaged to help Rolta establish a systematic, process-oriented UX practice that could be sustained in the long term. They planned to meet their goals by: Establishing a systematic, process-oriented UX discipline that could be sustained in the long term. Bringing about a cultural change that would establish a corporate-wide awareness of UX. Empowering a central UX team by teaching them the fundamental scientific UX engineering concepts such as information architecture, navigation design, grid-based layouts, etc. Ensuring they have the right delivery model, tools, processes and standards in place to most effectively deliver their UX mandate. Establishing governance and a strong executive champion with a passion for UX to overcome process and organizational challenges. The Approach User Experience Assessment & Institutionalization of UX Starting with an initial user experience assessment, HFI evaluated Rolta’s key geospatial information system products and together they embarked on an institutionalization strategy exercise. HFI visited Rolta’s facilities, spoke with senior and middle management, took stock of their products, solutions and development life cycle, and created a dashboard to measure the current and future state of progress based on an HFI-developed UX Maturity Score. Once maturity was assessed, HFI helped Rolta chart a roadmap to setting up a mature practice. The plan provided some quick wins, along with a 6-month and a 2-year plan. HFI provided guidance on setting up a central UX team that included job descriptions, reporting structures, and governance suited to Rolta’s organizational structure. HFI also assisted with training and certification needs by implementing an onsite Certified Usability Analyst (CUA) training program. In order to kick-start this journey, HFI also engaged with Rolta on a number of showcase projects that acted as exemplars, which set a clear direction for Rolta’s user interfaces. Once the plan’s structure was established the focus shifted to collaboration and sharing so that Rolta staff could leverage their UX assets at an Enterprise-level. HFI helped Rolta build a custom internal portal to share UX knowledge, methodologies, standards, templates, iconography, etc. To maximize adoption, HFI helped conduct company-wide awareness sessions on the repository to empower developers so that the central UX team could focus on more strategic initiatives, leaving some of the day-to-day UX needs in the hands of the newly trained development team. Results Rolta becomes the first HFI-certified Level V organization in the world As a result of these investments, Rolta is the first HFI-certified Level V Maturity organization in the world, validating their UX practice and providing credibility for the UX team. UX is now one of the strategic cross-organizational centers of excellence at Rolta, which brings measurable value across various products, solutions, and key customer projects. The company’s robust user-centered development process captures not only business requirements and functional requirements, but also user requirements. They now have a structured process for tweaks and changes that consider the impact on the overall user experience. This gives Rolta’s customers the confidence that they will meet not only their feature requirements but also their user experience needs. With its state-of-the-art usability lab, Rolta is now also offering UX as a service to its customers. Next Steps Find out how HFI can improve your Web site or application. Contact hfi@humanfactors.com or call 1-800-242-4480 “I am positive that the UX team now understands the user-centered design process as well as it understands the software development life cycle We are very happy to be the first HFI-certified Level V organization in the world. Our primary goal while embarking on the institutionalization journey was to set a high bar for ourselves. The certification is validation that we have achieved what we set out to do.” Laxmidhar Gaopande - Group Director, Rolta India Limited