Intranet Redesign Research
The project
My company was working on a redesign of a 10+ year old intranet. The approach that was being proposed was to reskin the home page while keeping all content, structure and design the same below the home page.
The Research Question
Our team had serious concerns that this would cause issues for our users from a findability and usability perspective. We proposed and got buy in for usability testing on a prototype of the site in order to determine if the proposed structure would be an acceptable solution.
My role
As the sole User Experience professional on the Intranet redesign team, I proposed, conducted, synthesized and reported on the usability testing.
Methodology
We created a prototype of the new home page and linked that prototype to the current intranet content.
The testing was conducted in person with 18 participants. Sessions were recorded using Morae usabilty testing and recording software. Each particiant was asked to complete 10 common tasks that were generally performed on the site, and then asked their general feelings on the approach. The last question was how the participants perceived the process was working, in order to determine their mental model.
Insights
Our users loved the new home page design, but as suspected, were very confused by the connection to the current system. Many questioned whether this was simply for the test, and not the way the system would work or look once in place.
The real win for this testing was recording the sessions and having permission from our users to share the recordings. Embedding clips of these recordings into our findings presentation for leadership sealed the decision to jump into the project headfirst and take on the complete redesign versus the simple reskin project.