A large insurance holding company was growing, but their processes and communications were becoming fragmented. Multiple subsidiaries and different departments had their preferred methods of communications and procedures despite efforts and campaigns to centralize these efforts across the company.
Stakeholders knew an intranet could help resolve some of this, but they needed something that would gain adoption quickly and easily.
I performed the research, synthesis, ideation, design, prototyping, and testing in a user-centered design process.
(Iterative, 2 week sprints)
Add’l Team: Product Owner, Front & Back End Dev Team, UI/Visual Designer, QA Team
Duration: 4 months, Phase I
-Sketch
-Invision
-Zeplin
-Flowmapp
-AdobeXD
Within the first 2 weeks I performed desktop research mainly using resources from NNGroup's research on employee intranets to understand best practices and common business scenarios for best-in-class designs.
I also sourced NNGroup intranet case studies to do competitive analysis evaluating and comparing heuristic principals of those that matched our industry as well as a few from different industries to identify potentially new ideas that would work, as well.
Finally, with deeper understand I created user-surveys and conducted 1:1 interviews with key stakeholders (who were also users) to understand both the business needs and user needs. Interviews took about 1.5 weeks with 5 - 7 individuals at about an hour per interview. I gave the option to keep it to 30 minutes, but users and stakeholders were very enthusiastic about the project and some wanted to include colleagues to join or listen in.
I synthesized the 1:1 user interview notes into emerging categories based on the answers, conversations, and common phrases I picked up on during the interviews. This was very important to maintain alignment and make a case for design decisions ahead. To this day, our team relies on the feedback given during this time to maintain focus and avoid feature creep. These categories also helped form the proper information architecture of the site.
I created lean user personas mainly to help identify the proper user access of the intranet.
From the card sort exercise I was able to develop a Red Route matrix to identify what users would be doing the most often to ensure these were the focus of user flows. This was shared with stakeholders for validation and approval.
Using FlowMapp, I quickly created the intranet sitemap with a few key red route user flows along with it.
I wrote out user stories to help developers understand the various scenarios and reasons and motivations behind them, backed by desktop and user research.
I was onboarding as a new employee with a newly assigned laptop. During that transition my wireframes were completely lost! Thankfully, I did thorough hand-sketches and did a lot of documentation to that made it easy to re-do the wireframes. We actually had a few layouts in mind, so after more brainstorming we ended up going with something more simple and were able to iterate quickly, moving right into mockups. So, the final product looks different than this wireframe I have available.
-Interactive Employee Directory
-Linkedin-style Employee Profiles
-Contemporary Social Interactions
-Events Calendar
-Personalized News Feed
-Intelligent Search
-Content-rich Social Workspaces
-Audience Segmentation
-Adoption Metrics Reporting
-Increase engagement
-Streamline communications
-Improve efficiency
-Enhance admin capabilities
-Provide useful metrics
-Hi-fidelity mockups
-Invision prototypes
-Internal user testing
-Design system
-Final Designs / Dev Hand-off
-QA / UAT
-CMS Management
I hypothesize that mass emails will decrease, employee recognition and program awareness will increase, and innovative ideas will come as modern social network features empower employees to engage with one another rapidly. To test this hypothesis, I will analyze adoption metrics such as employee connections, article shares and likes, “must read” confirmations, “congrats” button clicks, event RSVPs, and feedback submissions over the course of 1, 2 and 3 months. I will also will conduct usability testing with a segment of employees either remotely or in-person.
Take more time testing with actual users in the early phases of the UX Design process (through rapid prototypes). Try one feature at a time. Incorporate more animated prototypes so devs really understand your intention with the interactions. Sometimes your management team (i.e. product owner and stakeholder) won’t understand the value of these efforts. There are creative ways to incorporate more prototyping and testing that doesn’t always have to be extremely formal. Take time to make a case for it, prove it’s worth with one feature to begin with, if needed. Be curious, don’t assume, practice empathy everyday.
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