A New Website

The Hub is the intranet for all 12 companies under the Nowlake umbrella, connecting the over 3,000 employees from around the world with one main source for updates and links.

The Problem

We did not have an intranet set up for all 12 companies now included under one umbrella, so we needed to create it.

The Goal

We wanted to create a homepage for Nowlakers to feel connected, find updates, and access anything they needed quickly and efficiently.

Project Overview

This project was a full re-design with the intention to update the style, as well as to improve retention. To do this we had to re-imagine what our customer portal app could be. In the past, it was merely a tool to make payments faster an easier. As the company has grown, however, the app wasn't keeping up.

My Role

Project Lead/Product Designer

My role was as the project lead. As such, I was involved in this project from start to finish: brainstorming, UX, project management, and business-related processes. I worked together with business units and department heads to understand needs and define the scope of the project. I also designed a new logo, color palette, and layout.

The Scope

A Full Website Design

This was a full new website that needed to be created from scratch. The final product needed to be an intranet for all 12 companies under the Nowlake umbrella, with a focus on quick access links for employees.

This involved:

Brainstorming & Research
Planning
Designing
Developing & Testing
Launch

The Users

Nowlake Employees

Website visitors are exclusively employees under the Nowlake umbrella, who would be accessing every day as their homepage. With over 3,000 employees and 12 companies under the Nowlake umbrella, it's sometimes hard to truly bring everyone together.

Research

In this case, research started with Stakeholder Interviews. in this case, that meant speaking to department and company heads about their teams' needs. We asked each group to provide us with links they were using in their assorted "Resource Centers" (usually a page hosted on Microsoft or the like) and discussed what an intranet for their department would ideally look like.

Using Card Sorting, I worked with with my team to organize the links into groups that made it easiest to find what we were looking for. Once we had an organization we deemed best, we then shared it with a number of different employees to get second (and third and fourth) opinions, before coming to the final version.

As part of the UX strategy I introduced to Nowlake designs, I performed a sort of Competitor Audit. Alongside my team, we reviewed leading Intranet websites already in existence. We wanted to see what other companies were using and what was successful. As I often remind my team, we weren't trying to reinvent the wheel.

Reading through reviews, running through demos, and evaluating what we already knew was needed for our site, we were able to determine the best path forward for the Nowlake Hub.

Background

For a little background, it may be helpful to understand what "Nowlake" is. This is a company that only recently formed from two different entities: Westlake Financial and Nowcom. Between the two of them, they encompass over 3,000 employees across the globe, 12 subsidiary companies, and approximately $19 Billion in assets.

I joined the company 3 years ago, at a time when there was no real UX design being done and what there was had been created using programs like Adobe InDesign. Working within the Marketing Department, I support design across every aspect of our businesses and am responsible for leading UX and UI across all of our websites.

My skills grew rapidly over the course of this project. Here is some of what I achieved while working on the Hub:

Introduced UX design programs to the company (in particular, Adobe XD).
Implemented a design process. This made it possible to work in an efficient and structured manner, both internally and with other teams.
Established a design guide. This has helped create a consistent look and feel across the website.

The Design Process

As both the product designer and the primary visual designer, I had a number of different responsibilities:

Project Management (especially coordinating the various involved departments)
Developing the product vision & goals
Planning & defining the scope for the project
Designing the user interface & experience (customer journey building)
Wireframing & interactions

Tools Used:

Card sorting
Adobe XD was used to design the UI and flow
Adobe Illustrator was used to design the logo and icons

The goal was to improve company cohesion by making a company-wide intranet the included all brands and made tools used by each company accessible. At the start, the focus was primarily on easy access to important links (some of which aren't accessible any other way for security reasons), but it was also important to balance this with making it a webpage employees would actually want to use regularly.

To begin, I sketched out a basic User Flow:

This website is simple, so the user flow is as well. We didn't want to have endless pages that employees would need to navigate to find what they needed. As such, the wireframe really needed to start with the user interface of the home page. This is the place everyone starts, and it it is the main page that will be used.

I tried a few layouts to start:

I also tested out a number of logo designs with potential names:

All of this I proposed to company leadership to narrow everything down to the final layout and design.

Challenges

The entire project was done in-house as an interdepartmental effort among marketing, developers, with advice from each of the other departments/companies, so we needed to stay closely aligned in terms of what was desired from the website and what everyone's roles were. Staying organized and holding all stakeholders accountable for deadlines was a consistent challenge, but I was able to gain valuable experience with managing many disparate groups to get the information and approvals we needed to move forward.

Additionally, it was certainly a challenge to make the website at once cohesive and inclusive. The website needed to be useful to employees from 12 different companies in every single department. Making it inclusive while also being navigable was a challenge that involved working closely with my team and the stakeholders to organize and prioritize links.

Finally, an ongoing challenge is a lack of external resources. At this time, the Nowlake group of companies do not employ external consultants or programs to conduct testing or research. This is a challenge that I've been more than happy to meet however. Since establishing the design process, I have conducted UX Research and Usability Testing within the company and this project was no different.

The Result

What came from this project was a unique intranet website built by and for Nowlake employees. It is currently a live website and since launch, we have continued to make improvements. We have also given other departments access to upload content to the Recent Updates section, which has led to more posts that interest more employees.

For my part, I learned a great deal about managing a greater number of individuals. The links in particular involved getting feedback and approval from at least a dozen separate people. Managing projects that require this much interdepartmental coordination has been much easier going since I led the Hub design project.

Next steps: continuing to monitor employee usage, which includes regular User Interviews with employees. On top of that, we are continually working with the Development team to improve pain points. For example, multiple employees have now asked me about photo sharing from company events. Because of this, we have worked with the Development team to set up a photo gallery where employees can view, download, and comment on photos.

This is a living, breathing website for an ever-changing company. I expect that it will continue to evolve alongside its users.