NSW Telco Authority, making the intranet a more useful resource
NSW Telco Authority is a 400 person organisation within the Department of Customer Service. They deliver critical radio communications to first responders and essential services to keep people and places in NSW safe and connected.
The Telco SharePoint intranet was only 18 months old but it was receiving negative feedback and low engagement. Leadership saw value in the site but the team in charge was struggling to make the navigation and layout changes required to make it a useful resource Telco wide. I was engaged full-time for 6 months to refresh the site.
Undertake a full UX process from discovery and research through to design and implementation with the aim improve engagement and perception.
Scope
Stakeholder and user interviews
Stakeholder engagement
Workshop facilitation
Visual design
SharePoint development
Training documentation
Governance documentation
Process
Discover →
- Kickoff workshops
- Convene working group
- Stakeholder mapping
- Ecosystem mapping
- Technical outreach
- Project plan
- Checkpoint
Research →
- Content audit
- UX audit
- Analytics review
- Stakeholder interviews
- User interviews
- Survey
- Best practice research
- Technical outreach
Analyse & ideate →
- Affinity diagramming / clustering
- Information architecture
- Ideation
- Feature feasibility and prioritisation
- Custom component research
- Checkpoint
- Distribute content requests
Design →
- Wireframing
- Hi-fidelity mockups
- Prototype
- Templates in dev site
- User testing
- Graphic designer collaboration
- Test and iterate
- Test and iterate
- Checkpoint
- Feedback integration
Implement
- Migrate content
- Copywriter collaboration
- Content owner collaboration
- Governance documentation
- Training videos and docs
- Visual style guide
- User testing
- Checkpoint
- Accessibility checks
- Go live
- QA
- Launch
- Content owner drop in sessions
Stakeholder interviews
Before diving into solutions we needed to know assumptions were correct and what people in Telco actually wanted.
I interviewed 50 stakeholders and users in 37 interviews. I prepared a script but allowed for flexibility to account for a variety of participants. We wanted to know what they used, how often they used it, how they navigated the site and how they thought it could be more useful in their role and as an employee. I made audio recordings of the sessions and transcribed notes in Miro.
Over the course of the interviews archetypes started to emerge. These weren’t a formal part of the UX documentation but they helped me categorise stakeholders and understand their motivations.
Archetypes
Key insight – we want organisational clarity
Organisation clarity was asked for by roughly 90% of participants. Everything from high level information to individual capabilities. The reasons ranged from acknowledgement of work done and promoting services offered through to breaking down silos and reducing duplication of work.
Gathering and maintaining individual team content was a big task, but impossible to ignore.
I presented the top insight and ask back to senior leaders in business unit leadership meetings. Feedback was positive, if sometimes hesitant, and with these approvals sought I could power on with the project plan and the goal of building a useful, sustainable site.
Insights to actions
The good news was that the overall sentiment towards the intranet was positive. Proving our assumption that people across Telco wanted an intranet at all.
Out of the key insights and specific requests we identified actionable goals we could translate into features.
Information architecture
Clear navigation reduces cognitive load. Users reported having to rely on memory rather than intuition. Future proofing the navigation to have clear categories and places for an expanded navigation would help the team handle future content requests. Removing the need to just ‘add it on the end’.
SharePoint’s template restrictions and flat page structure meant common UI devices were out. No breadcrumbs, no highlighted nav elements and no dynamic sub navigation.
To help with find-ability of common tasks I worked within the SharePoint meganav to introduce ‘I’d like to…’ navigation columns on each main navigation.
An out of the box approach
Through testing, research and consultation it had became clear that ‘out of the box’ approach was essential to the project success. This meant abandoning several features we had proposed in the ideation phase. Finding the intersection between desirability and feasibility would give the site greater longevity.
Our design principles were:
- Less pdfs
- Clear visual styles for different types of links – documents, external sites and tools
- Consistent anchor links for long pages only
- Out of the box heading styles and page 2/3 – 1/3 layouts
- Guidance around when accordions could be used
- Minimal use of graphics and images for illustration purposes
- A content owner or contact listed on each page
Outcome
The refreshed intranet was delivered on-time and was well received. Analytics weren’t in place when my contract finished to accurately measure engagement but there was a definite perception shift.
The team plans to continually maintain and improve the site.
Anna’s UX insights and digital design skills were invaluable over the last six months, as was her cool, calm, collected and considered approach to simplifying the complex and solving problems.
Dave Morrant, Director Customer
