Redesigning the Corporate Intranet

My last piece of work for the Bank was to redesign its Corporate Intranet, and improving its IA (Information Architecture). The business case which drove this project established 2 KPIs around usability and findability for the company’s most popular channel which counts more than 100,000 pages and 40,000 users.

I first thought that it was a large project but the challenge was just exciting enough to take it on. I was confident I had enough experience in web design that I could consider it as a traditional exercise with established steps that I was already familiar with. Furthermore, I had guarantees from the executive level that there was a decent budget allocated.

We decided to engage an external agency called Step Two design – see clients list – to assist me through the project and we contracted a senior consultant who would mentor me while I’d proceed in 4 steps:

1. Content inventory and search reports analysis;
2. Card sorting;
3. IA testings (Card-based classification evaluation);
4. and wireframe testings.

My role during these usability exercises was to organize, to facilitate and sometimes to conduct them. The hardest challenge I faced was to find a good representation of all users and to have a goo diversity of profiles. The results could only be as good as I could get a good breathe of the company. I needed people with different roles, business units, locations (Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane) and experience. I certainly spend a lot of time on this considering that I was working in such a big company but at the end I believe that our results now are accurate.

I was also in charge the analysis all along the project, and my objective was to develop a new design that would meet better user needs and improve the usability. We established a modular model that organizes all the content within a common structure. The Corporate content is organized in 1 giant site called the group site and is placed at the center of all the online information. It has a specific IA that assists users to find its immediate content (group wide content), and it has a design that links better to all the other resources available online. Then around the group site, there are as many micro-sites as there are business units and communities of practice. The fashion of the Intranet is actually similar to the universe with planets around the Sun.
Step Two published a post ad-hock to describe a bit more our analysis. I invite you to visit their findings at this url.