Summer 2023 Internship | Ananya's Portfolio

My Summer 2023 Internship

Project Type & Timeline

Internship project done in coordination with the company’s UX team from June to August 2023

Project Details

Examining the organization's employee intranet as well as other touch points in employees’ day-to-day online journeys, to identify areas of improvement

Intranet Research Phase

I began my internship by researching the industry standards and trends for intranets, along with conducting a comparative analysis based on the other intranets in the syste, so that we could gauge how well my company’s intranet holds up.

Industry Standards

A Robust Search Functionality

With the large volume of content hosted on company intranets, the majority of users rely on search. Therefore, the search feature should be highly accurate and provide useful sorting and filtering options.

This was very applicable to my company’s intranet, as both analytics and user research showed a heavy reliance on the search functionality. As a result, suggestions for improving the sorting/filtering options, search bar placement, and search result layout were made.

Rigorous Content Organization

Again, with the immense load of content hosted on intranets, it’s necessary to ensure that every piece of content lives in the right part of the site and that it is readily accessible through the main navigation and through search. This can be accomplished through strategies such as content chunking and content tagging, as well as using card sorting and other methodologies when adding new content.

This was, again, very applicable to my company’s intranet, as there were sections that felt a bit disorganized. One suggestion for improving navigation I made was to implement content chunking on the main navigation bar. I felt the options available weren’t very intuitive or reflective of the content within each section.

This is the style of the current header in the company intranet. The block of text to the left accompanied by a filler picture doesn't encourage much user exploration or interest. The main navigation links on the right also don't provide users an idea of what is really contained within each section of the intranet, hindering the overall organization of the site.

While not as pretty, this is a temporary reorganization of information I created to show how the navigation could be presented instead. This way, users can get a quick overview of the section they're interested in rather than being shown a random assortment of different subpages.

Accessibility Standards

Every intranet should be meeting or exceeding basic accessibility standards.

Some opportunities I identified for my company to further improve their accessibility was to include features such as dark mode, speech to text, text to speech, alternative text of images, captions/transcripts of videos, etc.

Industry Trends

Personalization

To make intranets more engaging and relevant to employees, companies have started to utilize personalization, showing employees content based on their roles and interests. Furthermore, the use of AI and machine-learning algorithms has allowed for personalization to become automated, such as by providing suggestions based on users’ previous activity.

Social Features

To develop intranets that are more exciting and fun to use, companies have started to incorporate social features, improving user engagement by allowing employees to interact with one another and generate their own content. This may take the form of forums, social profiles, collaborative events, and any other functionality that supports employee connection and collaboration.

Visual Upgrades

To improve the look and feel of intranets, companies continue to incorporate visual upgrades to ensure the site and its content remain visually appealing. These include more data visualizations to present information in a digestible way. Visual designs also utilize more rounded corners and other mobile-inspired designs for a modern look, to resemble apps and buttons (sublty encouraging action) and to look friendlier and softer.

Remote Work

To adapt to the increase in employees working from home, companies have started to ensure that resources and updates are readily available on their intranet for those online. In addition, remote work has also increased intranet integrations with the other apps employees may use in their daily work.

Comparative Analysis

Other organizations’ intranets greatly varied on how they implemented their search functionality, but the greatest takeaways were from those with multiple sorting and filtering options and from those that integrated the phonebook into their content search. I recommended that my company take inspiration from the intranets with the most relevant options that would help users narrow their search.

Content Organization

For every option on the main navigation, my company’s intranet was one of the few to provide a main page for each section when you clicked directly on the words (e.g. ‘About’). Most other intranets just utilized the links in the dropdown menu, except for one other intranet that I felt mine could take inspiration from. I did like the concept of having a main page under each section, but I felt the ones my company’s intranet provided weren’t really serving their purpose. This other intranet showed us how it could be like a one-stop shop for the entire section, where it summarizes the content and provides links to the subpages. This was in contrast to my intranet, which just showcased some news articles and was a fairly disorganized page. Therefore, I suggested instead that the main pages should be centralized hubs for each given section, with all of the subpages and resources accessible from there itself.

This is a rough mock-up of what the main page for a section looked like. I felt it wasn’t really helpful to have news articles at the top without any other descriptive information. Additionally, the boxes down the right side went way past the main content and didn’t contribute much helpful information either.

This is a temporary rearrangement of content I designed to make the main section page more intuitive. The news articles are still there, but they're no longer the focus. Instead, the main content is the relevant information and links to the inner pages with the Career Development section. The sidebar is also still there with important reminders, but in the improved version, the boxes should be routinely updated and better aligned with the main content.

Personalization

When it came to personalization, I never observed a system intranet with a thorough, algorithm-driven level of customization. However, there were a few features I observed that seemed to give users some level of control over their experience and cater it to their own needs. Specifically, other organizations’ intranets allowed employees to customize a Bookmarks or Quick Links tab for easy access to the pages they would need on a regular basis. A couple of them also showcased employee-generated content on the home page by allowing employees to submit pictures to be featured. A less functional but still fun feature was how a few of them greeted the user by name (one also used the employee’s picture) - e.g. “Welcome, Ananya” or “What’s Up, Ananya”. All of these added a bit of a personal touch to the intranets, providing inspiration for more subtle forms of personalization.

User Research Phase

Following the preliminary research, my team and I began conducting user research to evaluate how current employees are using the intranet and related tools.

User Workshops

My team first used workshops to gauge how employees are navigating online tools throughout their work day and how our intranet fits into that experience. We wanted them to be able to map out a specific journey, where the participants could write out their steps, identify the tools and technologies involved with each step, and associate different emotions and/or struggles with them.

This led us to choose the online journey of annual goal-setting, since this scenario is universal for all employees and involves multiple steps, points of contact, and technologies. It would allow us to observe their interactions with the Career Development section of the intranet, as well as how the intranet as a whole plays a role in their virtual experiences, along with other online touch points.

These workshops involved three randomly selected employees from different persona groups (i.e. New Employees, Managers, Administrative Assistants) who would map out their process of setting goals at the beginning of the year. Later on, the findings from this exercise informed the journey maps deliverable.

Throughout the process, I helped plan and facilitate these workshops, and I also designed the more rudimentary maps for them. The initial template set up for the exercise was cluttered and hard to navigate, so I revised the template to decrease the time and effort it took for participants to complete their journey map. The template allowed participants to drag and drop elements as needed, and it used a very simple layout so participants could easily understand the format. They would place each step on the next available sticky note, though they didn’t have to use them all. We figured ten steps would be more than enough for this fairly simple process, which was validated by the workshops as participants rarely went over the limit.

After writing down their steps, they would use the touch point stack to note down what tools or technologies would be used during each step. Finally, they would drag down the faces to demonstrate the general feeling that they associate with each step; if they used an unhappy face, they would also add a pain point note to describe what about that step made it more frustrating or negative. After each round, employees were also asked to share their work so far and explain their reasoning, which gave us even more insight into the answers they wrote down.

The workshops themselves were straightforward and productive. They were conducted virtually and recorded with the participants’ consent. The employees were all also pretty receptive to the purpose of the workshop and picked up on their tasks fairly quickly. Once the workshops were completed, the findings provided us with some ways to move forward. They showed us how employees did rely on the informational articles found on the intranet but that there was a difficulty finding them, indicating that important information from those articles should be moved to a more permanent location. There were also some frustrations with other parts of goal-setting, such as with the timeline of the process or with navigation on other sites. Since some of these findings were outside the scope of this project, this feedback was passed on to the relevant teams that handle employee experiences with business-related activities.

Pilot User Interviews

After the user workshops, we also conducted a pilot user interview to begin honing down on any particular issues with the intranet itself. We approached this by asking interviewees to find certain items in sections we identified as those that could be hard to navigate. The findings from this interview would then inform and support the future changes that would be necessary.

Example Scenario: You want to accelerate your career growth by applying to the Employee Development Program. Find out more about this program and where/when to apply on the intranet.

The results from this interview reinforced the need of organizing the Career Development section so that content is more easily accessible from higher level navigation, as it would take the interviewee a while to find what was needed and feel confident that they ended up in the right place.

The interview also revealed an employee interest in personalization, as they suggested the site should have career development recommendations. They specifically detailed a wish to be shown career development opportunities relevant to their role and status and thought it would be helpful for users to be recommended resources they haven’t taken advantage of yet. While specific, this does demonstrate that there may be value in further researching the implementation and impact of some level of personalization for the intranet.

Design & Deliverables Phase

After the research, it was time to take our findings and translate them into a visual format so that we could present and further understand the information.

Personas

The UX team at my company had already drafted five personas meant to represent different types of employees. This mostly consisted of bullet points on a document, and I was tasked with transforming the existing content into the final product. I had to create a graphic to represent the information given and make sure it would work as a template for future personas as well. The idea was that it could work as a "living document" that could be updated as needed, indefinitely, rather than having my final product be 'final.'

I started by conducting some preliminary research on personas and their purpose. While I was familiar with the concept, I was unsure how to best represent the paragraphs of text given, and my team was also interested in the general standards for user personas across industries.

One decision we struggled with was the choice to include an image of a real-life person. It was important to the team that we didn’t focus too much on demographic information like a lot of other examples did because we didn’t want it to influence the way the personas were perceived and interpreted. However, we still wanted to ensure the point of the persona came across, that it promoted empathy and demonstrated the reality of what a real person from the user group might be like.

Some researched alternatives included using a picture of a group of people, using a drawing of a more cartoony-looking person, and not using a picture at all. However, those all felt like they defeated the purpose of a persona in the first place, as a group of people wouldn’t inspire that one-on-one connection needed, a cartoon would likely be perceived as childish or irrelevant, and no picture would make the persona function more like an archetype rather than representing a person. Eventually, we came to the decision that we would include a picture of a real person so that there was a visual representation of the persona to empathize with. We decided, though, that the written content of the persona would make no reference to the person’s demographic information like some other examples do, so that the persona’s personality, motivations, and struggles were the features that came through.

Another factor to consider here was the users of these personas. These personas would be used as an informational UX tool for the UX team and adjacent teams, such as IT, HR, and Marketing. With such a wide audience, with some who may not be familiar with the concept or purpose of personas, it was important that ours were easy to understand and interpret. Therefore, I decided that it was necessary to shorten the text, present some data visually, and make sure there are clear takeaways. I helped revamp the pre-existing content based on further research and revisions, by establishing a word count range for text content and adding visuals to represent other types of information.

For example, I thought it would be helpful to have a calendar-slider hybrid visual to represent the days each persona is in the office (vs. working remotely). At the time, different employees had differing arrangements for how flexible their work schedule was (like an individual contributor might only be in office two days a week, while a facilities worker would be in five days a week). However, as I was designing this visual, it was announced that, later in the year, all employees would be required to come in at least three days a week. Because employees’ work schedules would now be pretty much the same, it wasn’t useful to make a differentiation on the personas anymore. The visual that did make it onto the final template was the tools and technology content. Depending on employees’ position and work, they would have access to different work-provided devices (e.g. laptop, desktop, phone) and different apps. I felt this information would be most easily understood with pictures of said devices and apps, so users could quickly view the graphic and know what tools each persona has at their disposal.

I designed different iterations that were narrowed down to a final template. One of my favorite iterations before the final one was a version where I had the quote displayed as a speech bubble coming from the person’s mouth. It was a quick and easy way to show how the quote is meant to represent the persona in their own words, but after receiving feedback from my team, we realized that the format made the hierarchy and organization of information more confusing. The final layout ultimately flows better visually and better considers the needs of the user since it’s easier to scan and interpret the content.

I can’t share the actual personas created for my company, but I used the template to create a persona representing me and my experience as an intern!

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Journey Maps

To connect the personas and the user research, one of the last things I worked on was journey maps. We wanted to map out the generic journeys our participants described in the user workshops based on their respective persona.

Journey maps were a new UX tool for my team – they had never created any content for them before, so I first started this task by doing some general research. Again, while I was familiar with the concept, I wanted to make sure we clearly defined the requirements before getting started. The article and template I took the most inspiration was from Nielsen Norman Group (below).

While I didn’t format the visual design exactly like theirs, I decided on the general content and layout for a successful journey map based on the template. The template mostly gave me an idea of what all needed to go into the final product and how much space each piece of content needed. I had to design the journey map in the same dimensions of the persona (as they both needed to be presented on PowerPoint slides), so I moved the top row with the user’s information to be a left column instead. The journey’s phases then go across the rest of the map in columns, with the takeaways on the bottom. I also wanted to ensure that the design of the journey maps had a visual connection to that of the personas, since their content was interconnected.

I felt this layout better suited the format of our maps; my visual hierarchy was more effective in conveying the information than the templates because the takeaways and phases are aligned in columns, with the related information corresponding vertically. The preliminary information about the user is on the left, so people can read it first to gain an understanding of the scenario but still realize that it doesn’t necessarily correspond with each of the phases.

I again can’t share the actual journey maps I made, but here is the template with some information I added about myself and my own experiences during my internship!

The Laws of UX

A side project I completed during this internship was to create some visuals based around some common UX laws. These graphics would be used to help explain the UX team’s decisions to clients and stakeholders who may be unfamiliar with certain standards and practices. My team gave me some of the principles they most often reference from the Laws of UX site, and I worked on creating slides with a visual and short explanation.

*One idea I tried before ending up with these final versions was a clock animation to better represent Hick’s Law. It didn’t end up working out because of Figma export issues, but it did give me some practice with Figma’s animation capabilities. You can view the extent to which I worked on this before realizing it wouldn’t work for this project in this Figma file (just showcases the clock animation).

Final Thoughts

This internship gave me experience with so many different parts of the UX process, from industry & user research to content strategy to visual design.
I left feeling much more confident and well-rounded in my UI/UX abilities and knowledge, and I’m excited to jump back into this design work, with new roles that allow me to both apply my new skills and continue learning & improving as a UI/UX professional.

See the how the designs, interactions, and animations from this page work in this Figma file!