WFS Intranet

WorldFuel employees felt so overwhelmed by their intranet, that most completely disregarded it. Their leadership team turned to me for UX direction on how to make the site more useful and interactive.

Research

I first began by doing some secondary research in order to understand the best practices and existing trends that we could implement on our new intranet. Then, I looked at Nielsen Norman Group's 2019 and 2020 Annual Intranet Design Report for a little competitive analysis. From those reports, I was able to gather some notes on what worked well for other companies.

As a naturally curious person, this is my favorite phase of every project. I dove deep into the world of intranets because I wanted to fully grasp the impact employee experience and how their company's intranet can have a direct impact on their work processes or experience.

"Personalisation allows individual employees to fully leverage the power of intranets as a relevant experience that helps them with their working day and is centered around their needs." - Contentformula.com

Questions, questions, questions

As part of my design process, I like to pose our user problems as questions. This tactic works well when communicating with stakeholders and cross-functional teams because it makes our goals clear. This also kickstarts my ideation phase by forcing me to think in a very user-centric and solution-based way.

1. How might we reduce the clutter that currently exists on the site?
2. How might we organize tools and content in a way that all employees, no matter what department, will understand?
3. How might we work with leadership to determine who will be responsible for maintaining the site?

Current State Audit

My next step was to conduct an audit of their existing intranet, primarily their site map. With the help of the IT team, I found that there was a lot of outdated and duplicated content! There were documents or pages that the company no longer used or were duplicated because users did not know where to go to find that item. I also worked with out tech team to understand what our tech limitations were, given that we were using the Sharepoint platform.

I decided to make a list of items we should completely remove and ran that list by our product owner before presenting to leadership; this list was prepared based off of data like site clicks and "last updated" dates. With that, I was able to come up with my first draft of a proposed IA.

User Research + Proposed IA

Once I had a better idea of what I was working with, it was time to user test! I started off with a quick, eight-question survey to gauge how employees felt about the current site. The survey was sent to our entire company list. I asked about their likes, dislikes, asked them to rate content types in order of importance, and even asked what their ideal intranet would consist of. This information would eventually help me with the layout of the intranet, more specifically, the content hierarchy.

​After that, I sent out a hybrid card-sorting exercise to a small group of employees. I made sure to include employees from different position levels as well as different departments in order to get a more holistic understanding of our users' needs.

My final step in this project was to document all of our findings, identify teams that would be responsible for the content on the site, and hand-off the final layout/color guide to our SharePoint developers.

​I personally worked with the Human Resources team to walk them through how pages should be created, how department pages should be laid out, the different content categories they should write about, etc. Leadership was so excited to do this for their employees and employees were really looking forward to a better intranet experience!