Redesigned the main navigation information architecture of AmeriCorps' Office of Human Capital SharePoint site. This was based on employee focused research to better match their mental model on where content should be found.
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The Office of Human Capital's SharePoint intranet site had a main navigation that was a vertical-left configuration. The links to different departments under this information architecture did not accurately align to employee's mental models as employees expressed difficulty finding the content they needed.
Instead, employees resorted to using the global search bar or heavily relied on going back to bookmarked pages and files - which can be a problem when it comes to content governance. Other AmeriCorps intranet sites and pages had the more common top-horizontal navigation, so the left-vertical setup on the OHC site was breaking common convention and intranet consistency.
I facilitated 15 open card sort study sessions with active employees to redesign the information architecture of the primary navigation on the OHC site. I captured a wide variety of content that was on the OHC site pages and turned them into individual cards - ensuring that any possibility of priming was reduced to a minimum.
The participants were then recruited for the study and completed their respective open card sort sessions. Observations, questions and answers, and the card sort results were documented and compiled for analysis.
Using a publicly available excel spreadsheet template that was put together by Donna Spencer, author of Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories, I inputted the card sort data and constructed a similarity matrix.
This template was chosen due to the lack of available tools I could use to properly analyze the card sort data that had government clearance. The template was free, robust, and provided the matrix capabilities that we needed.
The spreadsheet acted as a hub to host all of the study data in a singular place. I was able to see how participants grouped the content, commonalities between groupings, and to start creating the new navigation architecture based directly on the research data.
Next, prototypes of the navigation information architecture were created. The primary nav links selected were the front-runner contenders for testing and then implementation onto the SharePoint site.
The secondary links were filled out for testing to validate if the proposed information architecture was meeting employee mental models and discovery needs. These links were filled out with sites or pages that my teammate or I have already redesigned or updated.
The secondary links and sub-headers would continuously be filled out and refined as more existing pages were redesigned, modified, consolidated, or archived.
The plan was to implement and integrate the core of the redesigned navigation, so employees can start using the refined structure to easily find current and future content. This provided the flexibility to build it out as progress on the overarching goal of redesigning the entire Office of Human Capital's intranet was made.
As a bonus, my teammate and I would be able to get a continuous collection of data and feedback through actual employee usage to refine this new navigation architecture over time.
The core of the navigation was implemented and live on the OHC intranet SharePoint site. The navigation was updated to include any newly created pages and redesigned pages.
Employees and leadership provided postitive reception to the new navigation. No issues from team leads came in about being unable to find critical content
Unfortunately, we were unable to complete the planned navigation redesign in full due to the current federal administration's workforce reduction efforts which affected this agency.