Taking off to a new employee hub
Repaving the employee platform for the new, current, and past employees at one of the largest airlines in the US.
UX
Information Architecture
Avanade
Pre-flight safety instructions
Our team was responsible for an envisioning project that modernized a large airline company’s (let’s call them “Contoso Airlines”) three employee portals: One for pre-hire, active employees, and alumni. Their current system had been designed years ago with an inefficient layout and across different platforms, leaving to confusion about where to find resources, contacts, and lead to overall frustration. So how do we create an employee intranet that can support over 70,000 active employees?
A consulting company had come in prior to do an envisioning, however the designs made were too custom to be implemented within budget constraints, leaving our client in a difficult position.
Our job was to come in, interact with some key stakeholders relating to different phases of employees in the airline’s lifecycle, and generate their new employee portal with as many out of the box components as possible vis SharePoint.
We delivered a full end-to-end journey map of the Avanade Airline’s employee life cycle, identifying key tasks and challenges, a site map which explained each level of content for employee portals, and both low fidelity and high fidelity wireframes of the Pre-Hire, Current Employee, and Alumni portals. As the primary UX Designer on the team, I was responsible for putting together the journey map, site map optimization, and low-fidelity wireframes while supporting our Lead Visual Designer in branding.
Consulting the Cabin
During our engagement, we did a few onsites to Contoso Airlines where we were able to conduct a Design Thinking session (that Luma Facilitator Certification really came in handy!) with key stakeholders that represented folks from the new-hire pool, active employees, as well as alumni liaisons. We brought our first draft of the user journey to do some active workshopping together with them to see what were the gaps in our understanding and facilitate the ways that different persona groups struggle with different tasks and how those could potentially interact.
Our design team also had several consultations with their branding team to understand how Contoso Airlines managed their signature branding and helped provide guidelines for how to use it correctly. The Visual Design lead and I then went through the old wireframes to understand from a UX standpoint what could be made out of the box and what would need to be scrapped all together.
Sorting through the luggage
One daunting task was the sitemap, this large v1 of the employee intranet was full of pages, and just like a airport full of lost luggage, it was both intimidating and never ending. Thankfully we had chatted about how deep we needed to go in terms of levels and agreed on going down at least 3 levels was sufficient enough. Phew.
Once we did a full site index, we were then able to see the core areas of content. We then used the feedback we received within the design thinking session to help us understand what mattered most to employees and what they were frequently going back to (for example, many corporate employees use the internal hub to view data and information on their station, as well as many people came to the site to understand their travel benefits, so things relating to benefits, travel, and their individual departments made sense at primary L0 candidates).
We’d then take our drafts and do refinement sessions with our clients. We didn’t want them to spell out what they think it should look like since that can be overwhelming to think about something so daunting (plus, that was our job), so we always came with drafts that felt detailed enough to be taken seriously but not polished enough to make them feel like they can’t say no. We want to seek out those points where someone sees something and knows “that’s not right” and then be able to work with them to make it feel right.
Taking off
We were tasked with designing screens that would serve as templates for when the next phase of this project took over (the implementation portion). I settled on designing the home screen, the department template, travel, company news, and digital tools. We needed to balance a mix of screens that we know the employee base directly wanted to show that we were overall moving in the right direction, but also indicate how these templates could be used for a multitude of different screens later down the line. Overall we wanted to create a consistent UX flow that started from the L0 down to the L2 pages. We started by creating the framework for what those global nav pages (L0s) would look like, then creating a consistent visual treatment [right name] pages (l1) and then the topic pages (l2).
I was working off of the idea that the higher up you were in the site architecture the more generalized the content would need to be and as you dove in deeper you would want to place the focus more on the content rather than the navigational elements. So on L0 pages I’d usually the largest hero section that could have 1-5 different subpages linked out to help users find which resource or topic they were going to, and as we moved to specific-topic pages we’d just use the full width header card as the title and left the remainder of the space more for the content. That way no matter what page you were on you could quickly see based on what the top of the page looked like.
Designing the department pages was tricky since I needed to balance several aspects:
I want to show the eventual page builder what was available to users but not just dump every component on the page. This ensured I allowed them to see options they might not usually consider while also providing a solid benchmark for a page that would work off the shelf. It can be very daunting to start from scratch, so providing a solid foundation with some additional features that could be relevant helps users quickly establish what’s needed and what’s not.
This area was a place we knew we were folding in custom components, specifically for departments to be able to show off their own custom stats and relevant information, so doing reviews of past department pages and understanding what different departments typically needed on their pages was key for providing justification on what needed to be custom or not.
One core thing we needed to balance was having a way to access all of the digital tools that Contoso Airline’s folk used. The initial goal was to have a toolbar that was custom to a users choice, however we had to pivot from that idea due to constraints around what was custom and what was out of the box. We created multiple options with different levels of out of the box components to showcase the benefit of going custom and understanding the compromise of going OOTB, and with the help of our tech lead we were able to have productive conversations that lead us to our final version, utilizing a predominantly OOTB shell with a few custom components that felt worth it.
The UX wires were done, and we were off to visual design. Usually I’d also handle this but I was lucky to have a Visual Lead staffed on this project who did a phenomenal job of putting together the high fidelity visual wireframes. We then set back off for Avanade Airlines to do our final deliverable hand off and final presentation and deboarded with positive feedback and an optimistic outlook on the next phase.
Landing
This was the largest design team I’ve worked on; with a Service Design Director, Art Director, Visual Designer, and me as the primary UX Designer. Usually I get to play with multiple hats, doing both UX and Visual Design in tandem, but this was the first time I was on a team where roles were very siloed and through that, much more vertical. I was doing a lot of deep UX work like creating user journey maps, doing site architecture audits and redesigns, and sticking to lower fidelity designs to showcase functionality over adherence to brand standards. I think I left this project with a much better understanding of doing only UX work, and affirmed that I enjoyed doing product design over just UX Design.
I learned a lot about client communication through the leads on this project. This was one of the first projects where I was directly interfacing with the clients head on, and it began to feel really natural by the end of it. There were several tips and things I’d pick up on my leads doing that slowly helped me both feel more comfortable, but also come off more professional.
I rolled off as the development of those portals came way, so currently, I believe the portals have finished development and should be smooth sailing for the folks at Contoso Airlines.