Develop a internal web portal that helps employees share and manage content and collaborate more effectively.
Project Summary
What was asked?
Flash Entertainment wanted to increase the utility and engagement of their corporate intranet. The website needed to connect better with its audience by surfacing time sensitive information, an intuitive information architecture, better internal collaboration, and a more coherent visual language that followed the corporate brand.
What I did?
- Improve the collaborative experience of project/event teams
- Inform the organization about upcoming events and employee perks
- Create a visual language that follows the corporate brand
- Adapt the website to respond when viewed on a mobile device
Challenge
Kickoff and Brand Strategy
We kicked off the project with a 2-hour workshop to understand the stakeholder goals and user pain points. The goal wasn’t to dive deep into extensive discussions or create a perfect solution, rather to understand high level objectives to create impact within a short time frame and limited budget.
The main deliverable then was to create hierarchal format of information organization and a visual language style that the internal teams could take forward to iterate and refine as the needs of the business and users evolved.
Another consideration was to streamline and seamlessly blend a usable interface to add content and documents to keep information fresh and accessible.
Approach
The initial design approach was to understand how the business operated and how leadership imagined their employees would use an internal website. It was key to engage with employees to understand what kind of tools they used currently to do their work and which types of websites, and social media they found engaging. From this I was able to synthesize a set of features and an initial layout that would create a first iteration wireframe workflow to solve these differences and capitalize on the similarities. The branding approach was to create a synergy between their corporate website mood and aspects of UAE and international cultures.
Mobile Responsive/Adaptive
Impact
The stakeholders were happy with the visual redesign and website layout and the project was deemed a success by the client.
Learnings: In retrospect, I feel the amount of employee (end user) face time wasn’t sufficient for the goals of the project. I would have preferred to set expectations on the importance of conducting task-based usability sessions at the wireframe and high-fidelity stage. As well as including more overall research opportunities to qualify and quantify the success of the redesign.
With this thought, my takeaway is to make sure I set the right expectations in promoting the need for user research and clearly communicate this need to achieve the user goals. Also it set me on the path to making sure I build the relationships to advocate effectively. I really enjoyed this project, the industry space, and I am proud of the final design.
