The brief - Cancer Research UK is a charity with thousands of staff. Their intranet was not fit for purpose to support all of their needs. Content was hard to find and it was very difficult for staff to get to the information they needed.
Understanding our users - I began by working with the communications team to create proto-personas. We did this through a workshop that allowed us to get our first assumptions about who are users were. It also helped us get an idea of the different types of people using the intranet, with a range of different needs.
We were then able to Interview a range of staff to understand their different needs. I also ran usability testing sessions to see how staff were using the old intranet and see their pain points first-hand. From this research, we found that the old intranet was hard to navigate around and the hierarchy of information was hard to understand. This helped shape our user goals and focus our attention on creating an intranet that made it easy to find the information staff needed quickly and easily.
I then ran sketching sessions with the communications team. These sessions were incredibly important both in helping the team express their thoughts and in creating a shared understanding of the project as a whole. We then created a prototype of the new intranetand tested out the new designs on all of the different types of users we identified in our earlier interviews.
Getting the information architecture just right - From the interviews, we clearly identified a big pain point that staff weren't able to find the information they needed. To improve this, we conducted a number of card sorting exercises and experimented with different approaches to displaying and labelling content.
As our users were in the building with us, we could quickly test out different versions of the information architecture, both through guerrilla testing with paper prototypes and by using digital surveys, every time getting a little bit closer to an order that suited the range of different people in the organisation.
The results - After learning much more about our user’s needs and pain points, we were able to design and build an intranet that allowed staff to find all the information they needed to get on with their jobs quickly and easily.
Users were able to navigate the intranet much faster and find relevant information when they needed it.
