Lutheran Community Services Northwest
How does a refined user interface improve a company?
Objective & Goals
Lutheran Community Services Northwest contracted me to redesign their internal intranet site interface and facilitate the transition from Google sites to Microsoft SharePoint sites. My scope of work was to redesign and implement the company intranet, an area specific page called Multicultural Community Services (“MCS”), and their IT Services page.
Objective:
Improve and facilitate the transition to Microsoft SharePoint for three main sites (company intranet, a district site, MCS, and the IT Services site).
Goals:
Improve employee productivity.
Enhance communication and collaboration.
Increase information accessibility.
Facilitate change management.
Enhance employee onboarding.
I created a research plan to help guide my research and design process.
The main goal was to ensure the revised intranet met the needs of the users and employed their trust again.
My plan began with research analysis where I understood stakeholder needs, interviewed users, and dove into competitor analysis.
Discover
Key takeaways:
Current feelings towards the intranet were not good.
Users were distrustful and frustrated, and held animosity to the current interface as there was no sense of accuracy of the information they could find on the site and no intuitive features were found.
Users held big concerns about the transition and how it will affect their work.
Many users noted the learning curve would be too much for their staff and they would need to field questions and comments, which did not fall under their scope of work.
Many areas of innovation.
I identified a few areas for innovation, including increased information accessibility and architecture, and a cultivation of community and a feedback loop between management and their employees.
Design & Validate
I developed a set of key features based on user needs from the Discover phase, which translated from the Stakeholder goals:
Library of up-to date information with SSD information found close-by.
District specific site with calendar and news page.
Anonymous forms and turning on SP comment section.
Intuitive navigation and sections within sites.
Clear trainings.
I also conducted a content audit of the current sites, categorizing their existing contents into items to include in the transition, items that would be nice to include but didn’t need to include, and items that we can leave out of the transition.
Design is still ongoing…
Conclusion
ongoing…
All icons are credited to the artists at The Noun Project.
