Research Reveals User Needs, Informs Intranet Refresh
Our client is an S&P 500 company and a recognized leader in the global financial services industry. Having identified opportunities to enhance their companywide intranet experience, they asked ITX’s User Experience Research (UXR) team for help to assess the system’s design, information architecture, and usability.
In this discovery-only engagement, ITX used quantitative and qualitative research methods to identify the user needs and pain points that, once resolved, would help our client achieve its vision for a fully functional intranet that meets the needs of a diverse and expanding user base.
ITX’s ability to identify pain points and propose innovative solutions was truly impressive. The UI prototypes were exceptional; they not only addressed the issues in our current design, but also introduced a level of intuitiveness and user-friendliness that our employees had long been yearning for. What truly stood out was your commitment to turning our vision into reality.
CHALLENGE
Client leadership recognized their intranet did not adequately represent the growing diversity of their global workforce. The absence of a standardized content structure, coupled with non-intuitive workflows, resulted in users creating workarounds that reduced engagement among the business segments.
ACTION
ITX’s UX team conducted research with participants from around the world, analyzed their findings, and applied them to develop and ‘tree test’ a new information architecture that was more inclusive of the entire organization and that improved the findability of needed resources.
RESULT
The team’s cumulative findings inspired creation of a UI style guide emphasizing consistency and accessibility. The site’s streamlined structure and clear navigation minimize change impact and preserve familiar elements, while the standardized content effectively represents business segments regardless of time zone.
Challenge.
As a global organization with an increasingly diverse and distributed workforce, our client understands the essential role their intranet plays in helping today’s modern teams feel connected – no matter where they work.
When company leadership learned of user experience issues – e.g., users feeling unrepresented; struggles with site navigation, lack of a standardized content structure – they reached out to ITX’s team of UX researchers and designers to better understand the source of user concerns.
ITX applied a variety of UXR techniques to capture examples and insights from the company’s employees and internal stakeholders in the Philippines and Western Pacific, across Europe, and in the U.S. Content specialists examined the entire site, looking for opportunities to enhance its overall design, information architecture, and ease of use.
In this discovery-only engagement, ITX sought to identify and articulate user concerns, lay the foundation for subsequent development work, and transform our client’s vision into a fully functional, globally inclusive and scalable intranet that meets the needs of their growing, distributed workforce.
Objective.
The key to delivering the right solution is solving for the right problem. Our client understands this, and it’s why they asked ITX to help breathe life into their long-term product vision.
ITX deployed an array of UXR techniques: interviews, surveys, focus groups, and card sorting – a method that helps researchers see how people understand and categorize information. It is particularly useful in creating a website information architecture that matches users’ needs and expectations.
Our research team then analyzed these findings and, along with existing research and analytics gathered by our client, identified key user themes, needs, and pain points. Design and content specialists developed an information architecture based on these findings and prepared a UI style guide focused on digital accessibility, intuitive workflows, and consistency.
Iterative rounds of usability testing followed – including tree testing, a type of UX architecture testing that assesses a proposed site’s structure by asking users to find items based on the website’s organization and terminology.
The Result
The ITX team concluded this initial engagement by delivering a more inclusive information architecture, enhancing site navigation, and designing a user-vetted prototype that would facilitate these goals.
Thanks to the UXR methodologies deployed here, the next phase of this engagement is well underway with a clear understanding of the problem to be solved, which inspired the following new features in the company’s intranet roadmap:
- Enhanced representation to all business segments across geographic locations,
- Streamlined structure, clarified navigation, and standardized content presentation,
- Minimized change impact, preserved familiar elements, communicated changes, and
- Facilitated key tasks via improved navigation and search functionality.
