case study
Corporate intranet for a global firm
My contributions
I led a team of researchers, UX and UI designers, and was responsible for:
Research – Developed protocols, discussion guides and competitor assessment strategy. Conducted stakeholder group worksessions and individual user interviews.
Information architecture – Devised navigation scheme and template layouts to support newly emphasized categories and incorporate additonal personalization.
Content strategy – Adjusted content category terms, taxonomy and meta-tagging for greater relevance, personalization, and improved content governance.
Design delivery – Oversaw the production and presentation of work products, and managed expectations and feedback from the client’s communications, design, and development teams.
Differentiation based on profile driven personas discovered via research
Meta-tagging scheme updated to automate content governance
Component library updated for legibility. accessibility, and brand compliance
Objective
Morgan Stanley’s Corporate and HR Communications had engaged my team in 2018 to help replatform and redesign their global intranet. Our design had proved successful, but as the pandemic brought new ways of working and emphasis on new issues for employees, we were brought back to help update their employee digital experience.
Updates include next best action suggestions for remote or new employees who need different guidance and support.
Uncovering opportunity with research
We evaluated site analytics, and conducted employee interviews with multiple business units and regions to see where additional opportunities lay. Together with an assessment of high-performing intranets at similar firms, we proposed tactics for achieving near- and long-term improvement.
Research results grouped by potential improvement themes
New content, new categories, new navigation
Based on both corporate communications imperatives and research findings, we re-configured the navigation scheme and terminology to incorporate new services while maintaining what was familiar and valued.
Detail of a comprehensive navigation scheme with new categorizations in familiar terms
Testing…testing
We compiled potential improvements in a series of design prototypes, and tested them with a combination of previous and new research participants to isolate what worked best for which type of employee.
Viable design options tested with real users
Personas of interest
We evaluated both our generative research and prototype usability testing to discover correlations between user attributes and likely preferences.
We articulated these correlations as personas that could be deduced from a combination of available user profile data, so the platform could anticipate preferred formats and content.
Differentiating behaviors, attitudes, and needs expressed as personas
Results
The site updates gave Morgan Stanley:
A more cohesive and comprehensible design system that delivered on business needs and user expectations.
A content strategy that enabled greater personalization based on user profile and preference criteria, and additional content governance controls.
Updated component designs to incorporate directly into their internal site design system.
Improved responsiveness for better experience on mobile devices.
Fully responsive design, with content reordered and reformatted for optimized mobile viewing