Art Direction
HTML/CSS
Graphic Design
Infographics
JIRA
Metalogix, ShareGate
User Experience (UX)
Did It Deliver? Let’s Check the Measurables
Site analytics for usage 6 months prior to launch and 6 months after revealed a modest increase in unique visitors (X%), but total visits doubled, averaging over 1.5 million total visits as opposed to the previous average of 760,000.
Five months after the portal upgrade was launched, we prompted users to fill out the same survey we had sent out a year before. Questions asked users to rate their experience from a scale of 1 to 10 on navigation, search, appearance, and ease of use. The average response jumped from a 4 to an 8.
Before/After
Before the redesign, the portal home page was distracted and confusing. What’s the most important content? Seems to be the big tiles on the right, but they are on the edge of the layout… so that would be strange. Also strange is the varying font sizes and colors in the graphics that clash with the standard HTML arial fonts.
After the redesign, there are clear areas of focus… the news carousel is in close proximity to the large, graphical news tiles, and both content sections are at the top, signaling their importance. Remaining content sections (More News, Yammer, Stock, Trending Sites, Did You Know, Org Announcements) are clearly delineated and grouped so that the user can quickly scan each.
A Bit of Background
A global corporation had a huge problem with their employee intranet portal. It was massive. It was painfully inconsistent and loosely governed. Without a governance strategy, the site had ballooned to 715 total sub sites and weighed over 160GB. And with over 100 different subsite owners, layouts never matched.
Over 50,000 global users relied on the portal for personal employment information, marketing updates, and business-critical information for technicians. However, a user survey revealed that navigating the portal through standard menus was difficult at best, and finding key documents through search was impossible. Even highly specific searches returned thousands of results where words were cherry picked from outdated files. There were hundreds of outdated and duplicate files, and without a centralized tagging system, searching for relevant information was nearly impossible.
To turn things around, I worked with a central IT SharePoint group and digital agency partner to formulate a multi-pronged attack. Over the course of two years, we developed a uniform theme, overhauled the site structure, audited site content, and performed a complete upgrade to SharePoint 2013 on-prem.
The end result was a slimmer, clean, and mobile-responsive website with personalized navigation and consistent branding.
Megamenu
The megamenu solved a critical navigation problem by organizing important employee-centric information. Through a combination of user surveys and site analytics, we determined which links were used and searched for the most.
The content for each dropdown differed, but we were able to create templates to avoid using unstructured HTML and allow for changes to be made in the central Term Store Management.
Before / After
Mobile Experience
For the experience on a phone browser, the website collapses, stacking elements in order of importance. The megamenu can be triggered through the hamburger icon, and megamenu sections expanded or collapsed further. Every interior page is also mobile responsive, including functional landing pages and news stories.
News Tiles
The news tiles were a special creation of mine, and something that I had instituted in the old portal a few years before the upgrade. The news tiles displayed relevant employee information about upcoming deadlines, HR programs, and enterprise technological initiatives. Like the megamenu, tiles were controlled centrally and could display different tiles to users by region and country.
