Enterprise entry portal

Project:

Entry portal for multiple services portals on SharePoint Online. This portal is expected to be a template for all other portals those can be developed using this portals UX framework.

Users:

Company employees and contractors.

Goal:

Provide UX template for all platforms on SharePoint online, such that any user can find the needed content easily and other stakeholder can use this template to onboard their service portal.

Pain points:

1. Users were clueless on vast intranet about where to find the needed content, due to multiple portals for various needs.

2. Stakeholders were not having consistent templates to push content so that deployment of their new portals can be easy.

3. Search algorithm was not intelligent enough for auto suggest and recognition by key words.

Project duration: 3.5 Months.

Team size: 2 UX designers, 1 Visual designer, 1 Graphic designer, 1 copywriter.

What I did: Research and Design management

• I was leading this engagement right from getting the project for Cognizant through requirement understanding and conducting stakeholder workshops to provide initial PoV and solution approach with plan to execute this project. This is based on usage data analytics and initial feedback from support metrics.

• I did card sorting using Delphi method to create information architecture for content types based on mental models derived from stakeholder discussions.

• This IA is standardized across all services so that users can follow and learn faster. Also, other service owners can use that as template to launch their service portals through this single platform

• I was regularly monitoring project activities and guiding the team with review comments and helping them with solution triggers to unblock their hurdles.

Challenges:

Client was not comfortable in exposing designers to actual users due to confidentiality. This challenge was solved by using remote unmoderated testing and earlier usage data analytics as feedback from users and initial testing was done with user representatives from stakeholder organizations.

Achievement:

1. My team designed single entry portal template for all needs and provided scalable interaction pattern on home page for various service portals with guiding infographics for easy navigation to need content.

2. Reduced effort in development of new sites due to templates connected to SharePoint Online based CMS

3. Users can come to single point of entry and find their content faster without reaching out to support.

Learning:

Different scenario of less user exposure and limited stakeholder inputs, gave me opportunity to learn methods like Delphi technique for card sorting and nature of project taught me to consider overall bigger enterprise landscape even for smaller entry portal template design project.

Sample screens of the portals under assessment for redesign

Heuristic evaluation of Gshare portal

Sample 1

Sample 2

Stakeholder discussions with whiteboarding

What I did:

• There were 3 stakeholders as owners of 3 platforms on SharePoint online (SPO) CMS

• Each one wanted to have consistent templates across all the platforms

• We started with given use cases as inputs for IA and started deriving initial ideations of user journeys so that they understand our objectives of UX concepts and IA concepts.

• We did brain storming and preliminary card sorting exercises using excel based inputs

and derived role-based categorizations.

Achievements:

• Created 3 evolving concepts container based, progressive expansion and AI based task flows for further evaluation.

• We leveraged site collection and hub sites hierarchy of SPO.

• Most users start their websites by navigating and then they resort to site search features if they don’t find what they want.i