Optum/UHG Intranet Redesign
Overview:
UX Design Studio Manager for the corporate Intranet re-architecture onto the Modern SharePoint platform for over 300k employees. Led a full team of UX specialists: designers, information architects, researchers, and accessibility engineers through a 10+ month project plan. Reported data and project status; worked closely with lead developers, stakeholders, management, marketing and content owners on research, content migration, branding, prototyping, iconography, templating, and architecture - all within strict regulatory and accessibility standards and deadlines.
Challenges:
Scope creep, a multitude of stakeholders, accessibility requirements that were difficult to solve in the 365 environment.
Approach:
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE AND RESEARCH
Prior to the development kickoff, my team performed exhaustive user research, best practice benchmarking, focus groups, and more in order to propose the best structure for navigation and implementation of the pages and page templates.
EARLY DESIGN PHASE
Designers began prototyping early in order to get feedback from a wide variety of employees, from nurses to HR employees to executives and janitors and everything in between — on a variety of common and uncommon tasks according to historical traffic data.
FOCUS GROUPS
Virtual focus groups were held, both conversational and with eye tracking, to determine where employees naturally look at the top level navigation for a certain piece of information on the Intranet.
COMPLICATED INFORMATION STRUCTURE MADE EASIER
The result was a simple, 6-item top navigation with submenus that were assigned to each “division” (we had to do a lot of justification and education around why the top menu no longer mirrored the organization structure, but instead helped people to intuitively find what they are looking for).
Outcome:
I managed a team of two information architects, two designers, a researcher, and two accessibility engineers through 20+ sprint cycles
Performed over a dozen training sessions with stakeholders, executives, and page owners for successful content migration
Launched on time in January 2022 on mobile and desktop to the entire 250k+ employee population
