Expertise Services Platform
What I did
Mapped institutional workflows and created a structured interface for faster, smarter expert matchmaking.
Problem
An academic institution wants to strengthen industry collaboration but lacks a scalable way to connect external partners with in-house expertise. Most engagements happen informally—through personal contacts and ad hoc emails—leaving potential collaborators unaware of available resources.
Public lab listings are broad and unstructured, with overlapping claims in areas like AI, machine learning, and data analytics. Industry partners struggle to identify the right teams, often resorting to guesswork, multiple outreach attempts, and long wait times. The result: a fragmented, inefficient process that burdens both faculty and external stakeholders.
Solution
- Proposed a dedicated “Services” landing page as a single, easy-to-update hub for all academia–industry collaboration offerings.
- Designed an intuitive, user-centric journey that minimizes touchpoints and accelerates access to initial information required to find the best-matching experts.
- Implemented granular, domain-specific filters to help industry partners quickly pinpoint the lab or team best suited to their challenge.
Gather Insights
- Mapped the existing workflow between the institution and industry partners to understand how project requests were currently handled.
- Identified key bottlenecks, including lack of visibility, reliance on personal connections, overlap between labs and research areas, and manual coordination via email.
- Conducted indirect competitor analysis, focusing on university websites that provide similar service, to explore relevant models, user flows and features.
Implementation Process
- Conducted a competitive audit of leading university collaboration portals and held workshops with internal stakeholders to map the end-to-end customer journey. Synthesized pain points, stakeholder expectations, and industry best practices into a consolidated feature backlog.
- Identified the unique value proposition of each laboratory across different research segments to improve alignment between industry needs and faculty expertise by mapping lab strengths and focus, simplifying the problem–solution match process. Results were used to design an advanced search tool, enabling faster, more targeted connections between researchers and external partners.
- Prepared and prioritized a feature list that balanced user expectations with the team’s operational capacity.
- Developed an initial sitemap to organize content by user role and collaboration goal. Created low-fidelity wireframes to establish clear navigation flows, page hierarchies, and call-to-action placements for rapid stakeholder feedback.
Handling Challenges
- Faced challenges collecting input from all 20+ labs due to travel schedules and summer vacations. Therefore created a shared document with a ready-made template and sent periodic reminders to encourage participation. Only labs missing input received follow-ups.
- To ensure flexibility and avoid uneven distribution of inquiries in the future, added both the lab head and a designated understudy as contact points per each lab—people who understand the team’s capacity, expertise, and availability.