PayPal’s intranet site is built on Microsoft SharePoint. It is a collection of individual SharePoint sites owned and managed by various departments within the company. I was contracted by the HR department to assist in a redesign of their employee and manager sites. However, I quickly discovered that the usability issues we needed to address were wider in scope and would have a systemic impact.
PayPal’s employee intranet was creating distinct usability issues for most users.
Data showed that that the current site did not provide clear and intuitive navigation. Employees were unable to quickly locate information.
Additionally, content management is not centralized which made it difficult for site administrators to update and maintain information on a regular basis.
I proposed a plan that focused on improving information architecture, adopting a content strategy, and implementing role-based access packages and personalization features.
My contract was terminated early due to budget constriction so I was unable to see the project through completion. However, within a short amount of time I was able to assess the problem, analyze current data, and deliver scalable recommendations to the team with steps to help them move forward on their own.
I was the only UX Designer assigned to the project and was responsible for strategy, research, and final execution. I was also the first UX Designer to ever work with this department and introduced the team to UX best practices and processes.
*Proprietary information is concealed and artwork has been modified per client NDA.
Prior to my employment, the HR team had conducted preliminary research by synthesizing site analytic reports and performing a focus group study with 17 groups of 50 participants to collect user feedback on their experience with the HR SharePoint site. This data gave us a solid foundation to work upon and insights into user pain points but it also implicated more systemic issues with the architecture of the root site.
I was not experienced in working with SharePoint sites and set out to understand more about them through secondary research.
I also came across valuable studies conducted by Nielsen Norman Group on intranet redesign and learned about the unique issues company face in developing intranet sites and common usability issues.
Focus group studies revealed the top user pain points:
I discovered that SharePoint is a common platform for large corporate intranets and useful for top-down communication, but it has limited customization options and may not align with the workflows of every business.
I came across several resources in my research that indicated the search feature in SharePoint has limited functionality and requires specific configurations.
With search as a critical issue, I wanted to engage with tech partners to get their expertise on performance issues. However, our team was struggling to establish a partnership with them.
Industry reports showed me that many of our challenges were quite common in most enterprise intranets due to the scale of resources and users.
To gain a better understanding of how the individual SharePoint sites are interconnected, I started deconstructing the current architecture and drafted site maps to identify dependencies and launch points into other systems.
The team also began developing the framework for personas so that we could identify the key user types who accessed the intranet hub and align them with user stories. We were in the process of collecting more data to build them out into user profiles when my assignment ended.
The HR team had already documented user stories and key “moments that matter” to ensure the best possible employee experience. I selected one and created a user flow from my own experience as a new employee searching for specific information about performance reviews.
Although the user flow was not created from field observation, it helped create a baseline contextual understanding of the navigational problems that users from the focus group were experiencing.
I performed a heuristic evaluation using the collection of screenshots and rough flows I had captured to this point. Since I was the only UX professional on the team, the study was limited to just my observations, but I felt that I was able to identify the failures that had the most impact on user navigability with focus on:
I discovered multiple dependencies on external sites that launched from in page links within SharePoint landing pages. Some of these sites stored all the information for whole categories (i.e. employee benefits) but were styled to old branding standards which broke the experience and took users off site causing an increase in bounce rates.
The user flow validated what we had learned from focus group feedback. I expected it to be difficult to find information using search and top-level navigation but I didn’t anticipate that it would be impossible to locate basic information.
It took eleven steps, two search methods, and a lot of persistence, but I could not find the information I was searching for.
The heuristic evaluation implicated that there were multiple failures in:
Poor taxonomy, page structure, and a flat top-level navigation were the underlying reasons users couldn’t easily navigate through the site.
Some of the accessibility issues I encountered were structural and did not provide clear page hierarchy for content or support reflow for zoom features through responsive design. Also, link styles for all interactive states were not consistently applied nor compliant with WCAG 2.2 requirements.
I put together a UX audit based on the information we had collected so far:
At this point, I knew that my contract was abruptly ending and wanted to handoff a scalable list of items that the HR team could continue working through without a designer.
Users are unable to easily navigate the site and complain that search returns poor results.
With search and navigability being critical usability issues, we first need to improve upon site architecture.
Inventory and Audit Content
Each individual SharePoint site should have an updated linear view of all their content so that they know what information is relevant. This is a process that the teams can work on in the interim until they can retain further design support.
A comprehensive audit will:
Revise Taxonomy
Once an audit is complete, then the team can use the data to restructure content and improve upon naming conventions of category, subcategory, and page names. Qualitative research methodologies such as card sorting, tree testing, and unmoderated usability studies can be used to gain user insights and test proposed solutions.
Redesign Top-Level Navigation
A deep hierarchical top-level navigation structure will help organize navigation and make it more scalable and user-friendly.
The current process for updating content is manual and increasingly difficult to maintain.
Centralized governance over content will rely on a cohesive strategy that can be implemented across each individual SharePoint site. It should include universal standards and policies for the following items:
Governance
Policies should include how information lifecycles will be handled from creation to managing updates through retirement. It should also include guidelines for collecting, analyzing, and reporting data and user feedback.
Content Quality
Information should be scannable, easy to understand, and should adapt to short attention spans. When possible, mixed media should be considered to make content more engaging.
Measure Engagement
Site administrators should be able to measure user engagement through a set of metrics set up to evaluate quality, consistency, and usability of content such as:
Design Standardization
All content should comply with a set of rules and guidelines that specify how content should look, sound, and function:
Content Design (UX Writing):
Visual Design:
It is difficult to manage who has access to certain features and information within the site.
Technical upgrades can add functionality needed to gain further control over how content is accessed by employees and managed by administrators.
Page Approval Workflows
SharePoint features that enable document approval workflows should be activated to support management of content and make it more of an automated process. For example, individual contributors should be able to make edits then submit them for approval by site administrators and legal teams who then approve and publish, or reject and request revision.
Improve Role Based Access
Once content is inventoried, it should also inform which roles are entitled to view each piece of information. Technological upgrades should be made to enable SharePoint access packages designed for role management based on user persona types and global location.
Content on the homepage is generic and doesn't feel relevant to the users needs and preferences. News feeds and associative links appear to be randomly selected .
When a user enters the site, they should land upon a page that is customized to their employee ID which would identify their unique role, worksite location, and team. This would provide the basis for aggregated information that is tailored to their individual needs and preferences through machine learning:
Technical partners owned the overall intranet product and did not welcome discussion or collaboration with my team on redesign so initial outreach was initially met with resistance.
Since working in siloes was counterproductive to our goals, our team escalated the concern to senior leadership for support. The usability issues we found had systemic implications and required a broader scope.
The success of the project would be reliant on collaboration and cooperation of cross-functional teams with distinct expertise.
Our team worked on a pitch deck defining the problem and its impact on business to support the broader discussion. I assisted them by enhancing the presentation through storytelling and putting together formal risk statements to heighten awareness.
By communicating risks to management, we were able to break down some of the communication barriers with the tech team and present them with our research findings
As a result, the tech team agreed to work together on the personalized homepage, or “Smart Page.”
The Smart Page project had taken priority and would be a great litmus test for design collaboration and development of some of the customizations we wanted to incorporate with smart logic.
Although my time on the team was short-lived, we made good progress in proposing a user-centered strategy to improve the overall intranet experience. Since the HR team was diligent in collecting preliminary data and user research, I was able to assess their work, identify critical problem areas, and provide recommendations they can start taking on their own.
My goal was to leave the team with scalable steps they can continue to work through, while emphasizing the importance of cross-functional engagement.
The task of inventorying and auditing content will give the team the insights needed to set up governing procedures and continue their advocacy for systemic overhaul with other stakeholders.
By using storytelling and presenting research from a user-centric point of view, we were able to make some headway with our technical partners by stressing the importance of engaging a UX mindset as they pursue their redesign.
I wanted all stakeholders to think about the intranet as the center of the digital workplace, not just a tech product they had to periodically maintain.
Finally, I was able to successfully raise awareness about accessibility. This was a subject that the HR team was not aware of and I educated them on WCAG requirements and policies that could impact them globally at the enterprise level. As a result, they were very receptive to prioritizing accessibilty and learning more about it.
