Background

FASSB is a key government branch that is leading Employment Ontario’s digital transformation. When I started at FASSB it was clear they had their work cut out for them in terms of their own digital transformation. We noticed right away that branch employees didn’t have a centralized location where they can access company resources, guides, or any general branch information. This is an issue common in government institutions as there is an abundance of resources, but a lack of access or lack of knowledge on where things digital documents are kept.

We determined an internal website could act as the jumping off point for branch employees to retrieve information and resources efficiently. On top of this, by using a CMS (Content Management System) such as WordPress it could give employees the ability to easily up keep the site themselves once we finished our internship.

My Role

My university colleague and I led the interaction design, graphic design and web development of the internal portal from April 2019 until the end of my internship in August. I collaborated with multiple team leads and business coordinators at FASSB. The whole process included design workshops, focus groups, IA research, wireframing, prototyping, final design specs, A/B tests and web development through WordPress.

Discovery: What type of info do people care about?

In order to ensure we had a good jumping off point to start wireframing, we wanted to make sure we had a full understanding of what type of information the employees of FASSB had difficulty fetching, and any workarounds they've become accustomed to. We held 2 focus group sessions where we held discussions and ran open card sorting activities. Each employee would write down what type of branch information they felt was most important to them and then logically organized them into groups.

Card sorting activity among staff.

Card sorting summary.

Define

Through the analysis of our focus groups and our own 1-on-1 interviews with team leads, we summarized the data into 3 key insights along with a HMW statement. The first insight highlights a lack of an on-boarding process which could be an entire project in itself, but this was important to identify as we saw it as an opportunity. Making resources that are geared towards newer employees easier to access was now in the forefront of our mind. The second insight was a need for an understanding of which projects are on-going and which unit is taking the work on, it became clear that there was a lack of transparency in the organization which we could tackle directly. Additionally, we identified there was no centralized location for data as documents were spread around in different drive locations, therefore creating a burden for employees who had to spend more time searching for their desired data.

Ideation and Evaluation

Sitemap refinements structured from our findings.

Wire-framing.

First draft of high-fidelity designs.

Final Testing and Handover

Once the website was finally developed and we were closing in on our launch date, we reached out to 12 other employees and asked them to use our website on a local environment and provide any feedback they had. In the end we received mostly positive responses and incorporated the feedback into the final product just before launch. Running this testing period not only gave us insight into some of the paint-points real users have that we might have overlooked, but also identified any bugs or incompatibilities that we could fix to create a truly polished product.

This left us with one final week to organize and document everything we’ve done as well as create walkthroughs/tutorials for the next co-op students.

Results and Takeaways

After going live with the website, Emily and I were able to track its use with Google Analytics and we noticed it began gaining significant traction over the previous site. Additionally, I received a lot of positive feedback on the new simplistic and easy to navigate design along with the new file housing feature. The new ability to access company files in such an efficient manner meant that it would save employees a lot more time in their daily work.

As a takeaway, I think that our team should have communicated the projects expectations better and in a way that every member could fully understand. At the beginning of the project, the tasks I was given didn't seem too overwhelming until I started working on the site and I began to feel swamped. I believe this was because I didn't fully realize how much work was expected of me, and on the other hand my team leaders didn't know exactly how much work it would take to make their desired product.

I was able to re-develop the website and learn how to use WordPress at a high level with just enough time to spare, however if we spent more time at the beginning of the project realizing the team's expectations, we could've planned more efficiently and saved time to build the site in an even better manner. If this was the case and we had extra time, I would've liked to spend more time gathering quality company content and running through more usability tests with the employees.