Intranet Modernization

The Problem

In early 2023 our intranet platform was approaching end-of-life and a project to upgrade to the latest version was underway. The existing user interface, launched five years before, suffered from some usability issues that needed to be addressed:

• The global navigation featured a single row of menu items that linked to landing pages

• It lacked dropdowns or multi-level menus to help guide employees to primary content

• The landing page design was crowded and entirely above-the-fold

• The information architecture was completely flat and sites had no inherent hierarchy

Employees regularly provided feedback that they found the intranet inefficient and cumbersome to navigate, partly due to these issues.

The Team

The intranet modernization project team was a small mix of remote employees from the Internal Comms and IT teams. I was the lead UX researcher and designer. We had a short pre-production schedule due to conflicts with other internal priorities, and an overall project timeframe of approximately 18 months.

Objective

Improve the intranet’s information architecture and minimize disruption to our employees’ existing mental model.

Personas

The project team needed to level set our perceptions of who was actually using the intranet. I analyzed 12 months of employee usage data to create six personas.

An AI image generator yielded virtual headshots for each Profile, and their Details and Goals came from a combination of the usage metrics and the results from a recent employee survey ("How do you use our intranet?").

Analyzing the Global Navigation

We planned to use a mega menu layout for our global navigation, so that employees would have quick access to essential sites, pages, and content. One of our earliest decisions was to remove "Leadership Hub" from the new global navigation. It didn't link to the same type of landing page and had been shoe-horned in several years prior due to a misunderstanding of how the global nav should be designed.

To determine what these essential items were, I sliced and diced the 12-month range of employee usage metrics again and focused on the top views. The IT team analyzed intranet search logs from the same timeframe to discover what our employees were purposefully trying to find. Of course, a corporate intranet can't be organized solely on the preferences of the employees; some content is mandatory due to corporate and regulatory needs, and our job was to find the right balance.

We merged all the data and gave it an objective and subjective review against our personas. This yielded a rough set of items that could be used for the intranet's global navigation. Now it was time to find out what our employees thought of it.

Card Sorting

A group of existing employees from across the company volunteered to participate in a closed card sorting exercise. We used the items identified from the analysis above, and supplied categories based on the existing global navigation.

The results were fairly consistent, with only a few outliers, and it helped us create an informed first version of the new global navigation. We tweaked the layout as needed to find the right balance between employee desire and corporate necessity.

Tree Test

I recruited a second group of employees for a subsequent tree test to validate and refine the results of the card sorting exercise. Some of the tasks used in the tree test were developed from metrics data on common employee behavior, while other tasks targeted changes that we introduced to the navigation.

The item with the most ambiguity from the card sort exercise ("Book and Manage Travel") was equally challenging in the tree test. Finding basic corporate information also had a surprisingly low success rate.

We further refined the global nav by moving the "About" section to the first spot in the global nav,  simplifying some of the Tier 2 menu labels, and making slight adjustments to the Tier 3 items.

Moderated Usability Test

Finally, I conducted a moderated test with a third group of employees. This test featured a working mock-up of the global navigation that was built using the new intranet platform. We recycled a couple tasks from the tree test, but most of them were new ones based on the employee behavior metrics. 

During this testing phase I received consistently positive comments about the proposed global nav, such as “Wow, [the menus are] so much better like this,” and “Thank you! This [style of navigation] is what people are used to.” Buoyed by this feedback, we were now ready to bring all the components together.

With the global navigation mostly nailed down by this point, the rest of the information architecture fell into place.

The new intranet platform has a built-in hierarchy system that provided the structure we desired -- a series of parent sites called "hubs" can be created based on categories such as project, department, or topic, and then sites in that category are associated with the appropriate hub site.  We built a hub for each of the top-level items in the global navigation and then mapped each intranet site accordingly.

The home pages for each hub contained sections that mirrored the global navigation mega menus , and included much more vertical space than the old landing pages. This layout allowed employees to easily explore and understand the way the intranet is organized within each hub. The global nav contained the essential items, and the hubs contained the full details.

There were a few changes made to the global navigation during this time, due to evolving priorities and internal organizational shifts, and we adjusted the associated hub pages as needed.