Yearbook Builder
An integral part of the Yearbook product is providing printed yearbooks, filled with comments from peers, to the celebrant of a work anniversary.
For each of our clients, yearbooks often vary based off the year level being celebrated, the language spoken by the employee, and the business unit or department of the employee. This creates a very complex process for our Yearbook designers, for which they have to create many versions of the Yearbook, depending on the client’s program settings.
For example, a common scenario would be a client having 12 year levels, 4 business units, and 4 languages. To create an individual file for each of those variations would mean 192 different files – even though the base and framework of all the yearbooks were largely the same.
To address this within the print process, we developed a product for our employees called the Yearbook Builder. The Yearbook Builder allows our designers to create 1 yearbook for all variations. In that one yearbook, the user can select the assets, and add the complexity of variation on an asset by asset basis.
Our user base for this product consisted of, at most, 6 production designers at O.C. Tanner. With our users so close at hand, this was a much less formal and much quicker process of research and user testing. By working closely together to understand their needs, the business and client needs, and the printing process requirements, we were able to create a product that would be used by only a few people, but would save time, complexity, and money for the entire company and our clients.
