The Pulse: a new and improved employee portal

Designing and migrating the contents of a 20 year old intranet

The Best Buy Canada intranet is an essential lifeline for all employees: those working at headquarters, our Blue Shirts working in retail locations, and those working in our distribution centres. After nearly 20 years using a legacy intranet that was internally developed, it was past time to replace it with something much more inspiring

Overview of my role

UX Lead - Employee Experience

As a part of the core team working with the intranet modernization, I had the chance to collaborate with Best Buy Canada employees in roles that I had never worked with before. It was a really rewarding and fun experience.

The Pulse initiative - organizational structure

My responsibilities & deliverables

  • I worked closely with the core team (PM, BA, Scrum Master, Intranet Admins, Comms Lead), as well as Content Teams:

    • Relationship-building across the entire organization.

    • Evangelizing UX to all teams throughout the company.

    • Presented designs to stakeholders on a regular basis.

    • Improved the Information Architecture of the CMS system so content owners and writers would easily find and edit/create the content needed.

    • User flow diagrams

    • Wireframes

    • Surveys to internal beta users

    • Customer & employee interviews

The Work

I worked on improving the experience for content writers and all segments of our employees was optimized using a 3rd party intranet service, Unily. I needed to ensure the crafting ofuseful and easily consumed page templates for all migrated and new content. I also needed to ensure that critical information could be accessed easily by retail associates during busy peak seasons.

The problem to be solved

Each of these segments, particularly the all-important folks working in our stores, needed real-time access to important documents on the system that were updated on a regular basis, sometimes multiple times a day.

Images speak a thousand words. Here’s just one sample of a legacy intranet page:

Before: the outdated legacy system

Discover

With every content team that I worked with, I initiated every working relationship with a workshop to understand the audience of the information, how they would use the information, and how the information would need to be stored in the CMS.

A working document in Miro from several workshop iterations

Design

The iterative design process included the following deliverables:

  • An improved information architecture for the CMS.

  • Over 24 content pages redesigned.

  • Developed a questionnaire for our beta users.

  • Training for content owners & administrators to meet brand and design standards when updating pages.

  • Collaboration with each content team to improve readability of the content on their pages, according the the use case of each.

Legacy Employee Tool Kit (ETK) homepage

The New Pulse homepage

Outcomes

This initiative was very rewarding on many levels. Once the new intranet was launched, much feedback was given about how pleasing and modern the interface was, as well as how easy it was to find the information needed for our colleagues to get their work done or find resources that they needed for their overall health and wellness.

In addition to this, I received an Associate of the Month award for outstanding service and collaboration with our internal teams.