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Ontario Energy Board's Intranet Redesign

I led the UX research activities for redesigning OEB’s intranet with the goals of making it more modern, user-friendly, and streamlined, and turn it into a centralized hub of information, resources, and social engagement for staff members.

Current_Intranet_Screenshot-transformed_

Timeline

May - Sep 2023

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Tools

Excel, SurveyMonkey, Google Analytics

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Role

Primary research

 

Team

Helen Chan (me), Carol Steski, Robert Stephen, Ashraf Ali, Lara Pocock

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Project Overview

The current intranet is static and outdated. As a static site, there are no integrations with other applications or collaboration tools, so each experience is independent and disparate. There is no automation or content management system. The intranet is only accessible to employees through VPN and is not available on mobile devices. SharePoint is increasingly being used by departments/divisions to promote their services and to create corporate repositories. For example, all OEB Corporate policies moved to SharePoint in 2022. This is creating an inconsistency in experience and findability of content for employees. The intranet also has no social engagement capabilities or personalization.

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Goals of the Redesign

  • Create a modern, clean design that aligns with our evolved brand 

  • Provide mobile access

  • Unify the employee experience by integrating collaboration tools

  • Promote efficiency and enable productivity by centralizing the digital workplace with access to tools and content employees need and want

  • Foster engagement and recognition by introducing social capabilities (reactions/liking/commenting). Explore greater use of video.

  • Enhance knowledge and connect employees to business: timely content and use of data to bring corporate activities to the forefront (social media feeds, scorecard status, performance cycle countdowns).

  • Streamline the content publishing process and institute more formal governance and oversight.

Survey

I surveyed 96 OEB staff members to understand their experiences with the current intranet. Key findings reveal that respondents prioritize simple navigation, centralized access to OEB documents, and relevant search results. While many find current pages easy to access, improvements are needed in search functionality, overall UI, integration with other systems, and the reintroduction of the staff directory. Customizability is suggested by some participants. Common issues reported include poor findability and usability. Regarding useful features from previous jobs, participants value ease of navigation, updated content, useful tools, and personalized content.

Interviews

To gather an in-depth understanding of the participants' pain points and needs, I conducted user interviews with 7 participants. Here are the actionable improvements:

  1. Address back-end issues to enhance the search function (3/7 participants found it problematic).

  2. Improve site accessibility by adjusting small text and reducing text-heavy content.

  3. Enhance user-friendly layout, particularly on the homepage, for a more engaging experience.

  4. Add more color, especially to Announcement pages, to improve the overall look and feel.

  5. Optimize navigation for Wire Weekly (OEB’s newsletter).

  6. Modernize the intranet to align with OEB’s evolving goals and values, adding depth and breadth.

  7. Organize the menu for better intuitiveness, aligning page names with menus.

  8. Reinstate the Employee Directory for easy staff member identification.

  9. Consider creating a dedicated events page for easier access than searching through Wire Weekly or Teams notices (Nice to have).

Usability Testing

Finally, I led 9 moderated usability testing sessions for 6 tasks to test the usability of the current intranet. 

 

Task #1 - Find the March 23, 2022 article on preparing for our hybrid return to office.

  • 6/9 failed the task. This was the most difficult task to complete as participants took the longest time on task. ​

    • 2/6 participants gave up after looking in the correct section (the Wire) but not being able to find the article.

 

Task #2 - Find Raj Pattani’s job title. 

  • Everyone completed the task successfully.

    • All participants used the organizational chart to find the employee’s job title. 

 

Task #3 - Find the burgundy PowerPoint template.

  • Everyone completed the task successfully. 

    • All participants found the PowerPoint template via Templates or the Presentation Centre under Work Resources. 

 

Task #4 - Find the corporate scorecard 2022 - 2023 Quarter 2 for Public Affairs.

  • 3/9 participants failed the task.

    • For those that failed, ⅔ participants tried to use the search function to look for the corporate scorecard. 

 

Task #5 - Find the OEB’s vision statement.

  • Everyone completed the task successfully. This was the easiest task to complete since it was only a one-step process with finding the vision statement under About the OEB.

 

Task #6 - Find out when yoga is happening. 

  • Everyone completed the task successfully by going to the Wire. Some participants indicated being familiar with the Wire as they often checked it, so they knew that the yoga dates would be located within this section. 

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Usability Testing Quotes

When asked whether anything frustrated them the most about the intranet, here is what participants said:

“Make full use of the entire page, meaning add a left navigation and incorporate information from the top to reduce it being so overwhelming and top heavy. The right navigation needs to have the same look and feel as the left navigation. The site is not balanced with only one navigation. It is not pleasing to the eye, which needs to be on top of the list when creating the new site, people enjoy images.” - PU09

“It wasn’t clear to me where I would find the corporate scorecard and so I would refer to the webpage search function on the top right of the homepage of the intranet thinking that would tell me where I could find it as opposed to me trying to determine whether it belongs under the About the OEB tab or is it Work Resources. And not being able to at least quickly find it under the webpage search engine function was a little frustrating.” - PU01

“Sometimes the main navigation bar is a bit overwhelming (e.g., Work Resources). I suggest reducing the amount of tabs. I also suggest hovering your mouse over a tab and more tabs pop out. For example, If you hover over Case Management under Work Resources, instead of having the 3 tabs appear below it, the 3 tabs pop out.” - PU06

Final Look of the New Intranet

Lessons Learned

Be proactive about asking for feedback.

Sometimes I felt too hyperindependent working on my own research tasks without asking anyone for constructive feedback. Reflecting back on the project, it would have been advantageous to create a research roadmap and share the importance and value of each research item with my team. 

Conduct a thorough heuristic evaluation.

Although I spoke with my team members about the UX issues I noticed on the website, I should have followed Nielson's Top 10 Heuristics and provided a more standardized format listing the usability issues and its severity. Doing a heuristic evaluation before conducting UX research studies would have helped gain stakeholder buy-in. 

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