LilaNET
Conducting User Research for an Intranet Site
Overview
Conducting user research to discover strategies for boosting user interaction rates on LIEBLANG.COM's Intranet Site, LilaNET. LIEBLANG.COM is a mid-sized German service company employing around 7500 individuals and offering cleaning, security, catering, and landscaping services.
Team
1 UX researcher (me 😉)
1 culture and commitment professional
1 marketing specialist
1 IT administrator
1 digitalization officer
Timeline
Overall: 8+ weeks
Research: 4 weeks
Implementation: 4 weeks
Background
Because of an update to Microsoft 365 it was decided to update the companies Intranet from SharePoint 2013 to new version SharePoint Online. By that opportunity, the intranet was completely new designed by the companies IT department.
The purpose of the new Intranet is the following:
📰 It's designed to communicate company specific news.
🧭 It should give users a point of orientation.
🎓 Exchange knowledge among employees.
📁Documents should be possible to exchange among different departments.
📈It should make work easier, allowing users to work more easily, effectively and quickly.
Problem
After the Intranets release, employees were barely using it. At this point, I started to conduct user research and figure out why. I wanted to discover the problem behind the low interaction rates.
User Interviews
In order to understand why the intranet functions are so purely used, I also wanted to understand how the employees do their work.
I conducted user interviews to gain qualitative data about the users experience with the intranet and their generell working methods.
To gather more insightful information and build a space of trust and familiarity, I decided to have face-to-face interviews.
I conducted user interviews to gain qualitative data about the users experience with the intranet and their generell working methods.
To gather more insightful information and build a space of trust and familiarity, I decided to have face-to-face interviews.
I interviewed 5 employees
- 2 administrative staffs
- 2 account manager
- 1 team leader
What exactly I wanted to understand:
- Understand users workwise in context to the intranet’s functions
- Identify Pain Points in using the intranet
- Identify if and how the specific features are used and if not, how the users reach their goals then
Users still use Physical Folders
After conducting the user interviews, I sorted the findings in an affinity diagram to find patterns in the user’s statements. These are my findings:
- All users find out about news via e-mail. They would like to receive more notifications about news and document updates, e.g.
“I think it would be great to get a notification when something [relevant to me] has been updated.”
- Form structure is chaotic and users struggle to find the right forms. One has built their own solutions:
“I have created a physical folder that contains all the forms I need. This is handy when things have to be done quickly”
- Most users share documents using the companies file server. Some also do it physical.
- Users do not feel sufficiently informed about external applications and would like to have a central location where they can find links to them.
- Users think the Intranet is complicated and overwhelming and they don’t like that it’s not completely in German as there are some Germanized English words in use like "Knowledgebase" or the names of the different Microsoft products.
“Always these English terms. Our employees can't even speak German properly and it's all in English here”
- They wish for a training course learning to use the new intranet
Simplify the Website
With the gathered findings from the interviews I presented my findings to the team, showing them the Affinity Map and explained how the interviews went.
I recommended the following points:
- Implement a redesigned homepage with reduced cognitive load.
- Restructure information architecture for forms and documents based on user feedback.
- Create a centralized section for external links to enhance resource accessibility.
- Customize the intranet to be entirely in German.
- Initiate training courses to empower users and improve intranet proficiency.
Results
The team decided to implement the following points:
- Reduce mental load on the starting page by excluding unnecessary information
- Exchange English terms with German ones
- Simplifying information structure
Old (left) and new (right) Sitemap
The "self service" section has been removed, as user interviews revealed that users have no idea what this means and do not need the sub-categories. It is planned to check this hypothesis in a user test.
Old (left) and new (right) Startpage
In order to reduce cognitive load on the Startpage, the bottom area was removed.
No KPI measurement possible
While the results were being implemented, the intranet was also set as the start page for users' Internet browsers and Teams applications via group policy. This distorted the subsequent user numbers. It was therefore no longer possible to determine how the user numbers had increased using this factor.
However, I often received personal feedback from employees that they now find the intranet start page and the information architecture clearer and more usable.
- Collaborating within a multidisciplinary team poses numerous challenges, given the diverse range of perspectives that need harmonization. As a UX designer, certain steps that seemed intuitive to me were occasionally hindered by divergent business objectives. Emphasizing the crucial aspect of return on investment is essential in navigating such situations.
- Its super important to focus on key performance indicators and compare them after changes to see if implemented changes were successful.
- Face to face interviews are great for building trust with the participant and gaining even better insights.
