Redesign of an Intranet CMS Platform
Project Overview
I was hired to do a UX audit of an Employee Experience Platform (EXP), essentially a CMS for company intranets.
- Interviewed stakeholders from all internal teams as well as 15+ customer teams to identify painpoints, missing or lacking functionality, and areas for growth.
- Created wireflows to map out the ideal user journey.
- Designed 150+ screens and interactive prototypes to test with users, validate and iterate.
- Worked with product management, engineering, client success, and other stakeholders throughout design process.
- Performed hundreds of hours of research across the content management landscape, studying dozens and dozens of CMS platforms for ease-of-use, best practices, and innovations.
The project ended up being the biggest transformation of the product in ten years, being incredibly well-received by clients, and positively noted by Gartner and Clearbox.
Focus Areas
- Enterprise Software & SAAS Product Design
- Design System Development
- Intranets & Employee Portals
- Mobile App Design
- Usability Testing & User Research
- Information Architecture
- Competitive Research
My Role
What started as a simple UX/UI audit turned into a 3+ year engagement of user research, product design, and development of a UI system. The product had been heavily engineering- and sales-driven, to the point that it was difficult to understand and use, and packed full of edge-case features that cluttered a bloated interface.
I interviewed many customer MarCom teams of content authors, intranet managers, and IT admins to identify pain-points and potential interface and UX improvements. I wireframed and prototyped, and ran live user tests with those customers to iterate on final designs and produce a data-driven, modern interface and experience.
The areas of the platform that I either redesigned or built from scratch include:
Content creation and page building (the page "canvas" experience)
Backend content management and structured content
Multi-lingual management
- Content lifecycle and editorial review workflows
- Digital Asset Management (DAM)
- Multi-channel mass communication
- Persona-based content variations
- Federated search, document search, and AI-assisted search
- Generative AI
- Full out-of-the-box intranet page templates, i.e. the "product" website within the platform.
Intranet Site Design Projects
In addition to working on the product development side, I've also worked with the Client Services team and on direct engagements to design multiple intranets for Akumina's clients based on my deep knowledge of the how the platform works and general intranet best practices.
However, many of these are under NDA, soooooo... I'll have to tell you about them sometime.
