User-focused improvements for UCL’s intranet
Scroll supplied a content strategist and content designer to help UCL make its intranet more user-friendly.
The challenge
UCL’s intranet had developed in an ad hoc way over the years. As a result, the homepage was difficult to use.
An initial review of the homepage, and user research findings, revealed problems affecting user engagement, such as:
too much information, making the homepage cluttered
difficulty in navigating the site and finding information quickly
unclear headings, making things hard to find
UCL wanted to encourage staff to engage with the intranet and make the homepage more user friendly. In the short term, the organisation needed help addressing some of the problems highlighted through a homepage redesign.
What they say about working with Scroll
“The Scroll team gave us some badly needed objective analysis about why our intranet was not performing and came up with a realistic improvement plan that was achievable within our current resource constraints, setting us back on a path of improved user experience.”
Chris Moos, Communications Manager, UCL
The solution
Scroll provided a content strategist and content designer, who worked closely with the communications team at UCL.
The content strategist:
conducted a review of the intranet homepage and analytics
carried out user research, interviewing a range of people working in different UCL teams
wrote a report summarising the review and research, with recommendations for the content designer to take forward
The content designer:
conducted further research and explored potential homepage designs with users
analysed website analytics to find out the most and least popular content and how users were engaging with the homepage
created wireframes of homepage designs based on user needs
explored homepage designs within the capabilities of Drupal 7
How we worked
We organised and ran a card sorting exercise to understand how users categorise information, with the aim of improving the findability of content.
We organised and ran an ideation session where users came up with ideas on how they wanted the homepage to look.
We analysed the research findings to help make design decisions.
Results
Recommendations of possible homepage designs for UCL to consider and have discussions about with the wider team before implementation
Annotated homepage designs with decisions explained using evidenced user needs.
Potential homepage designs built in Drupal 7.