Project - Insight Global's Corporate Intranet

Insight Global did not have a corporate intranet. Partnering with senior leadership, my team was tasked with the design.

Original Sketch

It all started with a paper sketch, provided by an executive, of what the homepage was to look like.

Opportunities and Goals

• Provide a mechanism for company-wide information

• Provide a means for individual teams or departments to provide information to their teams

• Create a centralized repository of content

• Reduce company-wide emails

Roles and Collaboration

• Acted as IxD, UX Manager, and design liaison to third party development partner.

• Collaborated with Product Owner on all requirements and new feature requests

• Worked hand-in-hand with visual designer on all design concepts

• Acted as primary point of contact for design needs for third party development team

  • Provided design specifications to third-party dev team, including responsive and adaptive design details

  • Participated in daily stand-ups with third-party dev team (Agile)

• Acted in the capacity of QA at the end of each sprint to ensure design integrity and goals were met

  • Coordinated with internal QA team as needed 

• On point to review designs or answer questions with executive stakeholders as well as the team handling content upkeep

Before we started any design work, we had to determine what platform we were going to use and we wanted to try and do some competitive analysis to see what constituted good intranet design. Plus, we needed to understand what departments within the org were needing to make available via the intranet.

Research

• Looked at what other companies had done for design by conducting online searches

• Purchased and reviewed Nielson Norman Group's Intranet Design Annual (2018 or 2019) - Top 10 Intranets

• Conducted competitive analysis of platforms utilized for intranets, i.e. Drupal, Sharepoint, etc.

• Drew on past experiences having worked on intranets for other entities

• Interviewed representatives from various groups or departments within the company to understand what they wanted to make available through the intranet

Sharepoint was the clear winner as the platform for IG's intranet.

Sharepoint Sites

Knowing we would prefer not to implement the design as provided, we started by building some concepts in Sharepoint Sites. This allowed us to quickly mock-up/prototype what a homepage could look like using Sharepoint's OOTB solutions, which would allow us to potentially save development costs as well. This did not meant the design requirements for the executive involved, so we moved onto creating our own design concepts.

Misc. Whiteboard and Paper Sketches

Next, we began whiteboarding and sketching some concepts, taking into account the types of content requested as well the content we knew we wanted to make available through the intranet.

Intranet Flow

This is an early user flow diagram for the hub and spoke site.

Misc. Mock-ups

We then moved into mocking up concepts we had come up with. We pulled together many concepts reflecting more conventional design approaches. Most started on the whiteboard. Regardless of how strong the concepts might have been or how conventional they were, most were dismissed. It all came down to 2 approaches.

Low-fidelity HTML/CSS Prototype

Drag your browser's window to see the shifts across breakpoints.

Sample of Design Specifications

Review another project