Benefits Open Season SharePoint Redesign
AmeriCorps Office of Human Capital's Benefits Open Season SharePoint intranet page was redesigned for enhanced content clarity, information architecture, and content delivery.
Published: 5/20/2025
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AmeriCorps Office of Human Capital's Benefits Open Season SharePoint intranet page was redesigned for enhanced content clarity, information architecture, and content delivery.
AmeriCorps' Office of Human Capital benefits team spent hundreds of hours answering employee questions through email and Microsoft Teams messages during past Benefits Open Season enrollment periods.
The questions sent to the benefits team were already answered on the Benefits Open Season SharePoint page or in linked resources from that page, but employees were ultimately asking for direct links or files to the content even after being redirected to the dedicated SharePoint page.
This meant that the content structure, information architecture, and content delivery were out of alignment to employee's existing mental models; important information was buried through walls of text with little to no visual hierarchy, unhelpful headers, and unclear links with low information scent.
First, I completed a heuristic analysis on the current-state page. I chose to do a heuristic analysis because of time restraints of a quick turnaround, but I knew that I would find key insights on what needed to be addressed and prioritized for greatest impact.
The main heuristic violations found were around visual hierarchy, content clarity, findability of information, and the overall usefulness of the content presented.
A mix of Nielson Norman's 10 Usability Heuristics and Abby Covert's Information Architecture Heuristics were used for this project.
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After I documented all the heuristic violations found, I prioritized the findings to focus on the higher impact areas and mapped out the existing links to see what content was being used. Then, I constructed wireframes for quick and easy ideation that sketched out possibilities on how the content on the page could be structured.
During the wireframing and low fidelity prototyping stage, I looped in a benefits team member into the process to ensure that any priority content was present and that documents and links were up to date; if not, they were discarded - which reduced page bloat.
The existing single, long page was transformed into 4 distinct pages: a landing page to introduce the enrollment period opportunity, then three other pages that focused on a specific part of the benefits content - FEHB, FEDVIP, and FSA.
I structured the pages in this way because employees were now able to focus on a single piece of the enrollment process at a time, but gave the ability to jump between parts of the process when needed.
These redesigned pages allowed for more concise and clear content through proper visual and typographical hierarchy along with links that had stronger information scent to resources - reducing cognitive load and improving information digestion.
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After the enrollment period closed, I hosted a post-launch touchpoint with the benefits team contact. They expressed to me that there was a noticeable reduction of emails and Microsoft Teams messages from employees seeking help or guidance on their benefits enrollments after the redesign.
We took a look at prior years' email volume to measure against and discovered there was approximately a 60% reduction in email volume from prior enrollment years.
This equated to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost savings by reducing time for both the benefits team members and for agency employees - allowing them to invest that time into mission critical initiatives and goals.
Over a 5-year projection - assuming no further design refinements - the total cost savings would be well over $1 million dollars for the agency.