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Health Finance Company’s Intranet
The health finance company specializes in products such as HSA (health savings accounts). Their original intranet had not been rolled out due to time and priority, so some employees didn’t know it existed, and others had not adopted it as a main resource. As a result, employees were getting so many emails, that important information was being missed. Employee tools and resources were disconnected requiring employees to go to multiple places to get their job done. The goal was to create an intranet that was a “one-stop-shop” for tools and resources that would communicate important information to their employees.
PROBLEM
The company was in need of a redesign of their intranet. Their parent company was moving from Classic Sharepoint to Modern Sharepoint. Since they had to move their site, they wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to create better information architecture and usability for their employees.
METHODS
Brief- To start the project a brief was created that had goals of the redesign. The brief was created by the subject matter experts who had received lots of feedback from many employees over the last year informally and from surveys. This was the foundation we started with.
Content Audit- We went through 3 websites to determine what was going to be on our redesigned intranet and what was not. If we decided it was enterprise wide, we put it on the intranet, if it was specific to a department, they kept it on their site.
Card Sort- We took all the content that we wanted from the multiple websites, and added new content that we wanted from the brief. We wrote all the content on post-it notes and included 5 important people to categorize the content and name the category. After this process, we continued to get feedback informally about names and where content belongs.
Sketches- With the card sort done we proceeded by sketching out each page of the newly redesigned intranet. We wanted to focus on consistency across the site and make it more visually appealing than the original intranet.
Feedback/Make Changes- With the pages all sketched out we brought our proposed designs to the team, walked through them individually, and got feedback. The team gave us feedback in the meeting, and we also gave them several days to think through any further feedback they may have before we proceeded to make further changes.
Team Approval- With all the changes made based off feedback, we brought the designs back to the team to get approval before we started to build the site out.
Build design- With the team’s approval we started building in Sharepoint Modern. There was a learning curve to start with, since I had never used Sharepoint, but the learning happened quickly and we were able to share some built out pages soon thereafter.
Feedback on brand- With the majority of the site built out, we shared it with a select few individuals to ensure it was on brand before showing it to other employees. We got some feedback, and more photo resources to proceed with making changes to be more on brand and adhere to brand standards.
Usability test- We used a company test script and added tasks to the script to ensure we tested areas that we wanted the most feedback on. I moderated 9 usability tests throughout the day with employees from a variety of teams across the company.
Synthesize information- Right after the usability tests were over, we met as a team to synthesize the data we all collected. We came up with a running list, delegated the tasks to finish the build.
FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
We found the original intranet’s information architecture needed fine-tuning to create a smoother experience. We also discovered what people expected for tools, resources, and even the look of the intranet. We took this information and made adjustments to create a better experience. Moving forward, the plan is and I would recommend doing a soft launch, where a handful of employees will use the intranet before rolling it out to everyone. Get feedback from that group of employees, make changes, then roll it out to the company. After rolling it out to the whole company, get feedback from employees throughout the company, and make changes. I wouldn’t recommend to make changes if it just based on one person’s opinion, but if it is a pattern that many people are struggling with a certain design feature. The company is already a great company with great culture, implementing a streamlined, aesthetically pleasing intranet will just continue to support that culture as they grow.