Moment

Any large company has an inherent knowledge management challenge–many people, many divisions, and many documents. A financial services company like Morgan Stanley has the problem tenfold. Not only do they have those all those people, divisions, and documents, one of their products is knowledge. They produce research–lots of it.

The Institutional Services group at Morgan Stanley engaged Moment to design an intranet search tool that would provide a single interface that searched across a multitude of data sources and return an integrated set of results. Coupled with complex permissions, a diverse set of users, and a rich set of disparate content, it made for a challenging project.

We undertook a series of participatory design exercises with everyone from a managing director to a junior analyst, from divisions like mergers and acquisitions to human resources. We were able to develop, test, and refine our designs with people that represented the diversity of the company.

Our solution was an interface that used “progressive disclosure” to reveal functionality and power as the user demanded it. What started as a simple keyword search, could be refined by a multitude of metadata fileds, but not until needed.

When?

Q4 2005