The O-Zone
A Social Intranet for The Onin Group
The Onin Group is a large Staffing company with over 600 internal employees in branches across the U.S. This project aimed to create a space for employees to access company resources, receive notifications, and collaborate across locations, all within a single platform.
The problem
The Onin Group experienced a large amount of growth in a short amount of time, leaving company resources buried within a structure that no longer made sense to the organization.
Additionally, corporate communications were often missed due to the increasing amount of company-wide emails.
Both of these issues created a widening knowledge gap of important policies and procedures that not only left the company vulnerable to legal risks but also severely impacted company culture as employees felt ill-equipped to do their jobs.
My role
As the UX strategist, I was responsible for organizing and planning the discovery, research sessions, and content strategy.
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I collaborated with other members of the product team (project manager, graphic designer, IT intern) and stakeholders (CEO & CIO executive sponsors, and department head SMEs) to narrow discovery findings and solidify feature and content builds.
The users
Our users spanned across all levels of the organization.
Users included internal employees from the executive team, home office employees, field employees such as the sales team and branch locations, regional and area managers, department heads, and managers located onsite at client locations.
Step 1: Product Scope & Discovery
The executive sponsors gave us a strict deadline of 6 months from discovery to launch, making a build from scratch development out of the question with our team's project load.
After vetting multiple different routes, I was willing to sacrifice some visual design flexibility in order to achieve a content-first design and advocated in favor of building with a framework called LumApps.
Step 2: Identify user types and site permissions
We knew the site's value would be defined by the relevancy of the content, meaning it would need to be capable of tailoring resources and notifications to each user based on:
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type (what user can do)
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permission (what user can view/access)
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group (location or department)
Step 3: Research
Our research utilized a hybrid of methods including contextual inquiry, user interviews, and analytics analysis. We aimed to understand two key areas:
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Employees’ existing mental models of company structure.
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Existing gaps in the current tools and resources.
Step 4: Analyze research and identify content needs.
Based on the insights from our contextual inquiry exercise, we were able to confirm that we would need a content strategy that prioritized organization over ownership, as employees' shared understanding of department functions was hazy at best.
The findings from the analytics analysis as well as user interviews confirmed many areas of enhancement in the tools and resources, but also identified that for many employees the biggest barrier was a lack of communication regarding existing offerings.
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Step 5: Feature & Content Planning
To kick off the planning process, we conducted a content audit of the existing knowledge base. Each item in the inventory was tagged according to the subject/job function it supported and then mapped within the content flow. We chose to include spaces for missing resources and utilized empty state messages to let the users know when they could expect the information on the site.
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To fully support company communications, planning these features accounted for both notifications and interactions. Because the Lumapps framework included integrations with G-Suite, we also added an interactive directory, allowing employees to search individuals and launch a message or voice call directly from a contact card.
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Outcome
Organization over ownership.
The final product was a digital workspace that provided users with an experience that successfully mirrored their physical offices in both comraderie through social interaction as well as the accessibility of information.
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More than ever, employees had the support they needed to do their jobs at the click of a button, regardless of location, department, or hierarchy.
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Subject matter experts can access resources quickly thanks to intuitive navigation and targeted terminology.​
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Sharing information is now accessible and less intimidating with social posts and communities.
The process
Lessons learned
The O-Zone should have launched with a dedicated support team.
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The success of the site is dependent upon its relevancy, making ongoing maintenance more than just an SME responsibility or a user request, but a usability issue for future iterations.
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