Design Sprint Delivers 55% Better Intranet Usability
Facilitated a four-day design sprint in Mumbai, producing three executive readouts and improving intranet usability: 55% increase in findability and 38% more required content identified.
The Ask
CONTEXT
A Fortune 100 organization initiated a strategic expansion to strengthen its international footprint, focusing on the high-growth South Asian market. To enable this transformation, the company looked to our established UX team to play a critical role in establishing and optimizing employee operations in India.
The Ask: Head to Mumbai, meet our colleagues and support them by redesigning their employee intranet, which will serve as foundation for many of our technology collaborations and shared vendor relationships.
The Reframe
One intranet walk through, a content inventory, current state sitemap build out, and a quick 18-hour flight later and we were ready to meet our intranet sponsors; the Managing Director of Application Development & Architecture, and the Senior Director of Enterprise Operations.
Within 20 minutes of time with them in their Mumbai, our scope and purpose had become crystal clear. The site, operations, and staff were about to explode in numbers over the next year. All eyes were on logistics for how to manage the anticipated growth.
MAKING A PIVOT
How might we: Decrease the time required to onboard new staff members while maintaining an excellent onboarding experience that makes staff feel welcome, comfortable, and a part of something greater?
4 Day Design Sprint
AGENDA
A great agenda must be able to pivot at a moments notice. We revamped the agenda on the first day to accommodate a request for executive readouts during the sprint.
HALLWAY STUDY
Success hinged on if the intranet could 'do more work' and reduce emails from staff and managers into HR and Operations. Our core question: Can staff easily find what they need on the intranet? We led a hallway study on the first day so that we could understand what worked and what didn't work in a new navigation structure for the website.
Short answer: The proposed intranet information architecture came up short. 53% of all first-click actions in the hallway studied failed to select the correct navigation option.
Images from Hallway Study (First Click and Most Used Content) & Live Readout Results
REDESIGN & RETEST
In this big push forward, we took the results from the hallway study and redesigned two alternative options to increase findability of key content and tasks. We wireframed both options and critiqued each with pros and cons. The critique showed a clear path to a singular option that we then used to retest using our original first-click protocol.
Results
Success! Our new sitemap resulted in 73% findability for top tasks, a newly branded design library of essential elements, and four enthusiastic executive readouts. See before and after visuals and results below.
Description | Outcome | Details |
Content & Task Findability |  | Top tasks went from 47% success rate to 73% success rate. A 55% increase. |
Sitemap | | Delivered a sitemap that could grow with the company's employee experience and site operations |
Intranet Content | 38%additional intranet content | Unexpectedly, hallway research uncovered content that employees were already using and we could easily pull into the new intranet |
Design Library | | In order for the team to build and manage the intranet, we built and shared dozens of design elements so that they could build and maintain consistency across the site as it scaled |