One of the biggest challenges our marketing department faced at WFI was the redesign of the company's corporate intranet. An effective intranet is an essential tool in the workday of any employee in a large company. However, when that tool is hard to use and suffers from severe usability problems, then employee productivity suffers.
Unfortunately, the WFI Intranet had many usability problems that caused confusion among employees. In addition, the intranet lacked some useful features and information that employees desperately needed.
As a result, our marketing department made overhauling the intranet a top priority. As the department's Web Developer and Graphic Designer, I played a key role in making the enhanced intranet a reality.
Completing a task of this magnitude had to be taken in a series of methodical steps. The first step was to establish a strong working relationship with the IT department. I coordinated meetings with the members of WFI's IT department who were responsible for engineering the intranet's database. This ensured that any user interface work I did would integrate seamlessly with their database. Essentially, our agreement was that IT would be responsible for the heavy-duty programming, and marketing would be responsible for the user interface and for creating and maintaining content.
Next, as a department we brainstormed ways to make the intranet more useful and exciting for our employees. One idea was to give the intranet a more creative name rather than simply calling it 'The WFI Intranet.' I came up with the name 'Atlas' as a tie-in to the look of the WFI corporate logo.
We then came up with ideas for new content that would make the intranet more useful. These included: the creation of a quarterly newsletter, putting recent press releases and the current stock price on the home page, and creating new categories for each major department in the company.
The next step was to create the new interface. Where necessary for continuity's sake, we kept certain interface conventions from the existing intranet. However, that's where the similarities ended. The concept I designed incorporated a unified navigation bar that existed on every page. This way, users could easily get from one section to another regardless of what they were currently viewing. I was also responsible for converting that concept into a functional, HTML Web site.
With the help of IT, we integrated my new interface with their database, and the result was a fully functional new intranet on a test server. We then asked key WFI employees to view our test site and give us feedback. After working out the bugs and making enhancements based on that feedback, Atlas went live in June 2005.
After the launch, our department administered a survey to all WFI employees. The results of this survey gave us some very important information regarding what employees liked and didn't like, and what they still wanted to see. This survey was the genesis of two new sections on Atlas: a vastly improved employee directory with complete contact info for all employees, and a special section called 'Compass' where employees could go to learn useful information about WFI's history, company structure, and operations.
Today, WFI employees are enjoying a much-improved intranet that puts the information they need most within a few clicks of the mouse. A project like this demonstrates the impact that an effective, functional design can have on the productivity of the person interacting with that design.
If your company's intranet or other projects are in need of an enhanced user interface, I encourage you to learn more about my Human Interface Consulting services.
