COMPANY INTRANET

Create a cohesive and versatile company intranet for three different countries
(USA, Canada and Latin America) that helps users easily identify what is going on within the company.

My Role

I was the lead designer with two additional designers assisting. I was responsible for working with the stakeholders from each country as well as various other teams to figure out what was required as well as coming up with a viable solution for everyone. This project really challenged my communications skills, but I always like a good challenge.

The Challenge

Design a company intranet that works for three different countries (US, Canada and Latin America), yet stays within the parameters of the SharePoint tool set and address each countries needs.

Discovery & Research

Working with three different countries can be a bit challenging since everything from colors to subject matter can vary in importance per country. There were a lot of discovery meetings to determine needs vs wants, as well as several meetings about figuring out how each country needed to compromise.

The bulk of the research ended up to be on colors, which I never would have expected. Needless to say we had finally determined the color palette for each country and realized the company required that everything be WCAG compliant for color blind users. It was a great learning experience and something to keep in mind for future projects since being compliant is becoming a must with many companies.

Visual & Functional Design

There were quite a few iterations of the base design, and as with everything once stakeholders see the visual elements there were more discussions about what was important and many changes where made. I don’t know if it was due to the different countries or the individuals themselves but there were more changes than normal. Towards the end I had to draw the proverbial line in the sand otherwise we would have went down the never-ending cycle of changes and missed our deadlines.

Conclusion

This project really challenged my communication skills, and being lead on this project allowed me to work on my leadership skills. At times this was a frustrating project trying to get everyone to listen to one another, but in the end each country was happy with the end results and the users gave it rave reviews.