• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Lesley Westerfer

Fox School of Business

Developing a Process for the Best User Experience

July 17, 2021 By Lesley Westerfer Leave a Comment

I’ve been recently tasked at my work to work with our IT department in the development of a new intranet system for our school. The overall university has its own system but our school specifically has never had a place for our faculty, staff and students to access internal communications. The goal of the project is to have a place other than the external website (which I manage) for our community to communicate on.

Unfortunately, I was not involved in the beginning of this project process and therefore, this is how it started: 

  1. Met with IT and discuss intranet needs/wants
  2. Communications/Marketing identifies what content the intranet should have
  3. IT shows examples of other intranets within the University, and the capabilities they can offer us (through the Lifery platform)
  4. Communications/Marketing starts populating content and building out widgets within the intranet
  5. IT looks at content and then develops a more consistent branded template, polishes layout
  6. Go live?

So, what’s wrong here? The answer is, A LOT. There was no real research done on the project beforehand. Neither side (or actor) within the project developed an actual process ahead of time and therefore many elements are being missed, and the user will not have the best experience possible.

Revised Wireframe
A rough wireframe I created for the revised process

Here is the new proposed process I would like to move forward with: 

  1. Identify the problem – the school does not have a intranet system in place
  2. Identify team members to include in the planning process and develop a project committee (these individuals should also be future content managers for the intranet)
  3. Conduct a brainstorming phase
    1. Share a Mural board or send out a survey across the school to ask our community what they want/need
    2. Conduct an affinity session with the project committee
  4. Conduct research
    1. Meet with other schools and the health system who have or are working on their own intranet project
    2. Look on the internet for examples of intranet navigation and wireframes that will align with our intranet
    3. Meet with our web development company to see what they can offer with IT’s system for custom-coded widgets that will better align with our brand
  5. Identify intranet goals from the research and brainstorming phases
  6. Develop information architecture and navigation layout
  7. Create content development strategy and governance plan
  8. Conduct user experience testing
  9. Provide content management training for those who were identified as the project team members and content managers
  10. Phase 1 rollout plan

Obviously, within these steps there are many more details. My biggest goal is to make sure we launch an intranet that is user-friendly and provides our organization with what it is looking for in this type of system. Let’s hope with an improved process and a stronger focus on usability testing for our target users, this project will be a huge success! Of course, even after launching we will need to go in and analyze the data, and reassess the content, navigation, etc. As well know, a process and a system should continuously be analyzed and improved.


Sources: 

  • Discover6Sigma: Affinity Diagram
  • Nielsen Norman Group: Journey Mapping 101 
  • AdobeXD: The Beginner’s Guide to IA in UX

Share:

  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: Project Management, User Experience Tagged With: process improvement, process planning, usability testing, user experience

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

My information

  • About
  • Interests
  • Resume
    • Certifications
  • Work

Recent Posts

  • The Future of Social Commerce
  • Digital Ad Prices Skyrocket
  • The QR Comeback
  • Remote Life: How UX Embraces the New Normal
  • Disney Institute: How the Entertainment Empire Trains on Process Improvement
  • Developing a Process for the Best User Experience

Copyright © 2022 · Lesley Westerfer
Disclaimer: The information included in e-portfolios are posted and maintained by the applicable student. Temple University makes no representation as to the accuracy or currency of this information.

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.