MY ROLE
UX Research, UI Design, Front-End Development
TIMELINE
2022-2024
Challenge
INSIDE is the intranet "hub" at Sandia National Laboratories. It provided Sandia-related news to employees as well as information relevant to their employment. However, there was little integration with other applications across the labs, and users found it difficult to find information that was pertinent to their employment. Plus, there was little to no customization of the experience, which had been a continued request of users.
Objectives
Tie INSIDE with enterprise applications at the labs to bring a more integrated experience for users.
Provide customization options and user profiles for employees to easily locate personal information and network with others.
Reorganize and optimize the layout of INSIDE to accommodate new functionality and content.
Research
Research tasks were completed to identify user pain points, determine requirements, and generate new ideas. I conducted the following activities along with other team members.
Competitive Analysis
We researched a variety of award-winning intranets in organizations across the world to discover how they approached the design of their intranet and content that was presented. We referred to Nielsen Norman's top intranet report for top trends in modern intranets and to describe the journeys that organizations took to build successful intranets and intranet hub applications.
User Interviews
Reaching out to a diverse group of employees was essential to find out how INSIDE was being used the most, what was working well and where there were pain points. I observed and participated in several of these user interview sessions.
Usage Analytics Analysis
Matomo had been used to collect usage data of INSIDE for over 4 years. With this data, we were able to infer what parts of the application were most popular, how much time users were spending and where they were coming from/going to. We also were able to collect demographic data, such as job title and department.
Design
Whiteboarding
With our research data in hand, it was time to hit the whiteboard and ideate on design ideas for how INSIDE could be re-imagined. Myself and each of the other designs worked on pen/paper and stickies to generate ideas for each of the new features of the app, including a new layout and user profile page.
We shared our ideas and identified the pros and cons of each approach. The design ideas we thought were most successful were identified for future use in our wireframes to put in front of users.
Low-Fidelity Wireframing
Next, we interpreted our whiteboarding design concepts in Balsamiq to begin building wireframes, which we could put in front of users. I produced a series of Balsamiq wireframes that presented a new layout of INSIDE, an employee menu, employee profile, and widget-specific designs.
Above: Examples of INSIDE layout changes and employee menu
Above: Example of the Employee profile screen, which enables the user to view information about their department, leave balances, equipment and other information specific to their employment at Sandia.
Socialization and User Feedback
After we completed our low-fidelity mockups, we presented them to employees of various roles and divisions across the labs. This gave us both an opportunity to socialize our effort and collect valuable feedback. Working with UX researchers on the project, we captured notes and aggregated our data to identify common themes and what was working and what needed to be re-worked in our wireframes.
High-Fidelity Prototyping
Once our wireframes were modified, we reviewed them with employees of various roles across the labs to get additional feedback. This iterative design work on our low-fidelity wireframes was instrumental to generating high-fidelity interactive prototypes. In our high-fidelity prototypes we developed the final visual design and determined many of the nuanced interaction patterns.
I created highly interactive prototypes in Axure that enabled the team to conduct extensive usability studies using real-world tasks.
Example:
"You are a level-one manager and you need to search for an employee in another division. Please locate Connor Lee and describe his title."
Above: Example of using Directory to search for an employee
Above: Example of a design pattern in the new Favorite Web Apps widget
Above: Using the tabbed interface for the new My Recent Activity widget
Above: Design of a new user profile page
Above: A new settings fly-out menu enables the user to toggle the visibility of their widgets and toggle a dark mode, a highly requested feature
Above: Example of toggling on dark mode
Results
An influx of positive feedback from Sandia employees noting the new customization and integration features of the new INSIDE.
A significant decrease in the amount of time spent among employees locating information relevant to their employment.
Praise from stakeholders across various organizations relating to the integration of their data into INSIDE (e.g. Enterprise Reporting).