Responsive Intranet Portal

Global Tire Company

Creating a communication portal for corporate communications

A global tire company needed a re-design for their corporate intranet that would serve as their primary communication portal, catering to thousands of associates throughout the world. The intranet re-design would be improved with a personalized user experience that engages users to be productive and collaborative.

Contents of this project has been modified due to a Non-Disclosure Agreement.

ROLE
UI Designer

AGENCY
PixelMill

YEAR
2017

Overview

The current intranet design was out-of-date and did not provide an intuitive experience for users. It also did not provide the option to incorporate engaging tools or opportunities for personalization. The client wanted a major overhaul of their intranet design to deliver a more relevant and personalized user experience to engage their global associates and enable them to be more informed, connected, and productive at work.

Specifically, the client outlined the following goals they wanted the redesign to address:

Improve employees’ awareness of company news, both globally and in their particular region
Deliver a more relevant and personalized experience to all employees
Make it easier to find important documents and information, such as HR resources, in order to increase productivity
Design a layout that would work many different languages, including right to left languages

BEFORE:

AFTER:

PHASE ONE

Research & Discovery

The initial phase of this project consisted of a thorough business analysis of the company’s users, goals, wants, and needs of their re-designed intranet. This was conducted through a current site analysis, user surveys, and user interviews. As a result, we discovered the common pain points of the current intranet and defined use cases that would assist with driving the direction of the intranet re-design. Some examples of our use cases include:

Use Case #1:
I am able to access the global tire company site while connected to the global tire company network, from different global locations and on various devices.
Recommendation:
The intranet will be built on a responsive framework for O365. The site should have an intuitive layout, relevant links to a variety of pages, and a clean display of other necessary content, including announcements and updates.
Use Case #2:
As a user of the intranet, I would prefer a more personalized experience when viewing news articles. I would like the ability see news articles within my region and subscribe to news articles within other regions. I would also like to view the news articles in my language.
Recommendation:
News articles will be tagged with specific regions. Once the employee has been associated with a region, the news article will show within their feed. If an employee would like to see news from a region they do not belong to, they can elect to subscribe to the news feed. The employee will see the featured, regional, and subscribed news articles.
Use Case #3:
As a user, it’s a confusing trying to navigate around the current intranet. I would like to find information quickly without having to guess where something lives.
Recommendation:
With a large amount of data and information, the intranet should be intuitively organized. The Information Architecture (IA) of a site is defined by its ability to increase the information finding across a number of outlets. In addition, a bookmark feature will let each user personalize their bookmark’s list with most important links and utilized pages.
Use Case #4:
As a content administrator I would like to review and be notified when a news article has been submitted by an approved author. Once the article has been approved, I would like to publish the article, either on the current date or a future date.
Recommendation:
Workflows help by automating cumbersome manual processes and reduce the amount of possible user error. We will create a seamless news article submission and article publication, using work flows that allows approved authors to submit and content administrators to review and approve news articles.

PHASE TWO

User Experience

Following the discovery phase, we used our defined user strategy and objectives to guide us with designing the user experience. Since the main purpose of the intranet was for global news and communications, the experience was highly focused on giving hierarchy to the regional news items. In addition, we added a more personalized experience for users by providing the ability to subscribe to specific regional news items, which would then rollup in their My News section. Other components throughout the homepage such as the upcoming events, people search, and yammer embed provided users the ability to stay productive at work and connected with other employees.

PHASE THREE

Visual Design

Creating a style guide

Once our user experience solutions were approved, we introduced the visual design elements that would assist with enhancing the experience by utilizing the company’s corporate branding style guide. This created an interface that was familiar to the company’s employees while providing a newly re-designed intranet that was modern and up-to-date with current design standards.