Optimizing the retail employee intranet experience

Research, facilitation, and design for enhancements to a leading retailer’s employee intranet applications.

Rightpoint

The client’s Intranet was recently redesigned and launched utilizing SharePoint as the underlying engine. This created a new platform for all employee engagement, yet had several applications remaining to be optimized for the thousands of retail associates that would need it on a day-to-day basis. My initial engagement began with a focus on the shift management and calendaring tools used by associates, followed by additional document management IA, as well as researching future tools and workflows leveraging mobile devices within the stores.

• Employees have little time during their workday to manage their schedules and interact with store management.
• Device access and Internet bandwidth varied from store to store.
• Culture did not favor usage of phones for employee work while on the store floor.
• Employees were used to managing their day-to-day work on a variety of legacy systems and applications that did not connect with each other.
• New tools and functionality needed to be integrated into an existing intranet as well as connect with legacy management systems.

I led UX design and direction for the Intranet applications. This included preliminary research conducted onsite at various locations, prototyping and design, testing new designs with employees, and facilitating additional workshops with employees to identify and articulate new opportunities for the company to further improve employee engagement via the intranet and other potential applications.

Leveraging existing style guidelines and following an agile development approach, we set out to build a new scheduling application for the intranet. This also had to connect with legacy scheduling applications that were still in use that tied into corporate timekeeping and payroll.

Traditionally, employees managed scheduling in a very manual process with their store and floor managers, relying on printed out schedules and often limited to 1 computer to access communication regarding their calendar. This created bottlenecks and a lack of transparency for management as they worked around last minute changes and conflicts.

Working with the client and interviewing employees, we identified essential scheduling tasks and created a system that accounted for viewing shifts, requesting shift changes and time off, management approval, and interdepartmental communication to make shift exchanges more efficient.

The new calendar provided a snapshot for each employee of their upcoming weeks as well as providing access to archived shifts for record keeping purposes.

The responsive nature of the calendar accounted for those using mobile devices to access the application. Again, keeping the calendar as simple as possible was important for mobile devices as some locations were gated allowing access to the intranet only from the store location and many locations had limited bandwidth in the store.

The application was successfully launched and tested with employees across various retail locations.  

In addition to overseeing this optimization, I led client/employee discovery workshops to understand how the client could better use available technology to optimize the employee experience even further. Through traditional whiteboarding and affinity mapping exercises, as well as individual interviews and interactive modeling workshops, a short list of opportunities were generated for further research and investment, all of which aligned with practical needs of the employees.