Teck Resources
Intranet Design
Teck Resources' current intranet has remained unchanged for nearly a decade. Its redesign is an opportunity to improve the user experience and accessibility, address the pain points and integrate with other features for over 10,700 employees who use the intranet on daily basis.
This opportunity not only opens a door to redesign its visual aesthetics which reflects the latest branding guideline but also increase the work efficiency, technology adoption with the Microsoft ecosystem and ultimately improve employee satisfaction rate.
Overview
Project Timeline
2 Weeks
Role & Contribution
Visual Design
UX Design
Supported Device
Desktop Web
Team Structure
Project Manager
Product Designer
Front-End Developer
Back-End Developer
Business Aanlyst
Background
Avanade came in to help conduct a series of design thinking workshops and strategy exercises to define some of the new directions for the future intranet in early 2019. In late 2020, Teck Resources decided to build their new intranet with Akumina, a modern intranet & employee experience platform that empowers global enterprises and provides deep integration with Microsoft Office 365 applications.
Problem Statement
The current intranet has remained unchanged for nearly a decade, it is a traditional intranet offering one-way communication, serving as a central source of news and employee resources such as forms, policies and procedures.
Teck was looking to modernize it by incorporating new features, updating the look and feel, improving accessibility and integrate with other features and disparate intranets
Who are the users?
10,700+ Teck Resources employees
What are the user needs
Better user experience and accessibility
Simplified and intuitive navigation
Improved aesthetics
Being in control to access other features and technologies easily
Our Solution
It is in our contract that Avanade will be building the new intranet with Akumina's intranet platform and its framework.
MY ROLE
As a Product Designer
Learned the vision and mission of the refreshed intranet, and synthesized the user research findings to help me better address the user needs and accessibility issues in the design.
Learned Tech Resources 2020 Branding Guideline and successfully translate the print/graphic design branding guideline into digital design.
Learned the tech constraints of Akumina and worked closely with developers to validate the feasibility of the new components to ensure we were staying within the scope and timeline.
Led the wireframe and UI design for the refreshed intranet.
Presented the design to the client’s executive team and key stakeholders, articulated the design decision and successfully get the buy-in to help the project moving forward.
About Akumina
Akumina is the employee experience platform founded on a simple yet powerful belief that empowering employees through technology to work smarter, not harder will make them more engaged and more effective at building your business. Akumina makes building and deploying customizable, branded workplace experiences quick and easy.
Learn more about Akumina
Technology
Akumina brings all the technology together seamlessly. It delivers pre-built integrations to the Microsoft productivity suite included Sharepoint, OneDrive, Teams and Outlooks, and provides quick access to all the Microsoft documents in few clicks on Intranet.
Customization
Akumina provides a level of customization on the widget components and liberty to apply the client’s branding to the overall look and feel. Our primary focus was to uncover the business & employee needs from Teck Resources side and how do we fulfill the needs through Akumina’s technology capability.
AUDIT & ANALYSIS
Current Intranet
Analysis
Lack of personalized experience
Navigation is complicated and not intuitive
A lot of links on the left panel taking over the real estate
Clients were not happy with their Featured component because it looks outdated and the purpose of the component is competing with the In The Spotlight component on the right.
Teck in the News component is the exact same as Announcements component, employees were confused why did it have two repetitive components on the page.
Inconsistency issue on CTA, and type system across the entire experience.
Colour palette is not following the latest branding guideline.
The usage of negative space is too dominant. The white isn’t really complimenting the layout but instead making the users hard to focus on the content itself.
Opportunity to play with the footer to make it more dynamic and useful.
“Which areas of the current intranet do people engage with emotionally or cognitively, more than others?”
During the current intranet walkthrough meeting, I listened very carefully to learn which area do employees engage the most, and how can I translate those most engaged hot areas into the new intranet design.
I created this experience heatmap to help me breakdown the areas that Teck employees interact the most, my goal was to create a new intranet homepage that inherits what users are familiar with the optimized experience and functionality through Akumina's tech capability and also delivers a fresh, modernized look and feels that compliments Teck Resources' new branding.
DESIGN PROCESS
Low-Fi Wireframes
I designed a low-fidelity wireframe and presented it to the stakeholders to get feedback.
The visual really helped the client to see how the new intranet could come together, and it helped us to discuss further on the importance of widgets and how we should prioritize them on the layout.
Once we gathered all the feedback from the first wireframe presentation, we then proceeded to create more refined wireframes and presented them in our second wireframe presentation, we got the signed off with the version shown below.
Visual Design
I designed the hi-fidelity UI screens with respect to Teck Resources’ branding guideline. The strategy was to present the visual design of the intranet homepage to get the sign off on the overall look and feel, to help us save on time and avoid the repetitive back and forth nitty-gritty UI discussion.
First Attempt
I designed a few different variations for the Me Bar Management widget to give stakeholders some liberty to determine the look and feel they’d like to proceed.
Some stakeholders were still married to their old intranet’s Featured News layout, I created another variation of UI screen to help them understand the reason why I recommended my layout in the first place.
Client chose Option B to move forward.
Incorporate real content and assets
To help us get the buy-in from the client’s executive team, our strategy was to incorporate the real content, photos/images, icons and other data from their existing intranet. It helped us to reduce the noises and discussion around the “Lorum Ipsum” placeholder text on titles or irrelevant stock images, by doing this it allowed the decision-makers to stay focused on the design itself to get the sign-off.
One last stretch: executive presentation + final iteration
We presented the hi-fidelity homepage screen to the client’s executive team who uses the intranet on daily basis as well, we received very positive feedback around the refreshed look and feel we worked on the new intranet, but also getting some feedback on widgets’ priority.
We learned the rationale behind their feedback and updated the homepage layout for one last time.
Final Deliverable
Client Feedback
“The design looks really good. They look very modernized and solves the pain points we had with the current intranet, thank you and the team's great work leading us through this process."
– Manager of Communication Projects, Teck Resources