Upgrading a central Hub for employees

Efficiency and productivity are important factors to most, if not all companies. Helping employees be more efficient in their workday is important to maintaining happiness in the workplace.
OVERVIEW
At The Washington Post, the time came to revamp their employee intranet. In this digital age, the company has been making successful transition by creating innovative products to meet the demand of the media industry. I was hired by The Washington Post to transform their intranet, not only by visual design, but also to help employees be more efficient in their roles. From discovery to development, The team and I were able to uncover important insights and create an impactful solution into helping employees in the workplace.
DESKTOP
MOBILE

methodology overview

RESEARCH

  • Employee Interviews
  • Stakeholder Interviews
  • Card Sorting Workshop
  • Tree Testing
  • Competitive Analysis

DESIGN

  • Site-Maps
  • Persona Building
  • Wireframes & Sketches
  • Rapid Prototyping
  • Design System Library
  • Responsive Design

TOOLS

  • Sketch
  • Whimsical
  • Invision
  • Optimal Workshop
  • Google Analytics

Interviews

During this process, we focused on asking the right questions helped us understand areas of opportunity that we could focus on. For our user interviews, I began with a list of open ended questions to find out the following;

How users were using the website.
Any pain points they had in their day to day.
Any difficulties they encountered with their current intranet.
We uncovered some great insights on use;

Building Persona Profiles

Being able to identify your users is important to building a successful solution. Personas are conceptual tools created to develop and validate design ideas. The personas reflect aggregated and synthesized traits of people interviewed during research.

Card Sorting & Tree Testing Activities

We also wanted to rule out any assumptions by verifying our site map decisions. Card sorting & tree testing allowed us to assess the current architecture of the intranet and create a more informed sitemap proposal.

From our card sorting and tree testing session, we found that users had a hard time differentiating resources once they reached the 'Employee Resources' section of the website.  

The above image is part of the tree testing activity results. We conducted a remote activity where users were provided with a scenario & given specific tasks to complete. The goal of the activity was to see which path or options made sense to the user.

We then looked at the activities with a high failure rate to see which part of the current site map caused some confusion. Ultimately, this method of research let us go back and revisit some areas of opportunity within the sitemap.

Information Architecture

With the research conducted and analyzed, our sitemap was organized so users could easily locate resource online. Below is a snapshot of the sitemap generated for mapping resources in our new design.

Wire Framing Components

To build the best experience, we wanted to have consistent layouts throughout the website. in order to meet the goal requirements of the new intranet, we needed to confirm that the proposed layout templates met those business requirements (event registration, social integration, workday integration, etc).

Collaborating is an important part of creating great solutions. Working together with other stakeholders through design sprints, interviews, and other methods helped elevate the user experience.

Visual Design - Understanding Brand Personality & Identity

This process usually starts with understanding our stakeholders vision for the product. Through interviews and design sprints, the goal is to create a product that resonates with our leaders & employees. During our interviews, one of our questions was the following;

if you could describe this product with three words/attributes, what would they be?

This question is mean to uncover the tone/voice of the product or brand. Using the practice of color theory, I could then align a brands voice and turning wireframes into a digital product