Honeywell Intranet
Design Sprint
Background
In 2014 Honeywell's Employee portal was nothing but desirable. It was the highest-ranked page visited by employees only because it was the un-editable default browser home page.
There had been 3 failed attempts to redesign the intranet. The leadership wanted results and they wanted it fast. We suggested running a design sprint and promised 2 Proof of Concepts with the direction & principles of the New Intranet experience. Today Honeywell calls it the Digital Workplace (DWP)
Role: I co-facilitated the Design Sprint and, helped bring together various ideas to a viable solution and designed prototypes. Tests were run by independent consultants.
Day 0: Recruiting Candidates
To ensure that we had the right people who will influence the solution and contribute to a productive sprint, the candidates include:
Freshers and veterans at Honeywell who have struggled or are used to the intranet
Intranet architects
Enterprise products & service Reps
A UX designer (myself)
130 employees across the globe to test the prototype on Day 5
Some of these candidates played more than one role. For example a couple of Enterprise service reps also played the role of Honeywell veterans. It's not ideal and could bias the outcome, but getting the exact match within a week's notice and conflicting schedules was difficult. In total we had 25 active participants.
As an addition to the workshop we were also required to summarize the findings, direction and next steps to the VP of Communications- Mike Bennet, Global Director External Communications & Brand - Susan Gross and VP of Engineering Krishna Mikkilineni. It was a project kicked off and later on approved directly by the Boardroom.
Day 1: Understand & Map
Employees were looking for Travel, Leave, Approvals, Payslips, IT Support, etc., but couldn't find what they were looking for in the dump of links on each page or even through search. They usually asked others for a direct link that they bookmarked. Often going down a rabbit hole to find something...Logging into various services in a "Single Sign-on" environment. If you are a new hire - Good luck finding anything.
Service Admins & Support staff had to train and maintain multiple ticketing solutions that were an unnecessary cost. Unfortunately, most did not promote a Self Serve approach leading to a high number of tickets.
Communications want to keep employees informed of recent initiatives and news. But, unfortunately, employees weren't keen on this.
The Intranet did not work on mobile, so besides dedicated apps, the Corp BYOD program wasn't useful for most employees.
Employee Quotes
"I Feel like the Intranet has something against me. It’s like they don’t want me to find the information I am looking for!"
"I always end up asking someone how to get there and have to bookmark every link."
"Why do I have to keep logging in to every section of the site? And no it’s not an excuse that they are different applications!"
Admin & Sr. Management Quotes
"We have to train our support staff for each and every ticketing solution if we need to be flexible with our resources."
"We spend a lot of money in maintaining different platforms, which don’t do any complex tasks. We just want everything to work on Sharepoint."
Problem Statement
Can the Intranet be useful & desirable?Day 2 - 3: Ideate & Decide
The next step was to turn the issues into opportunities and sketch out ideas.
The team of 25 people broke up into five groups. The Facilitator and I rotated across teams to ensure ideas aren't ignored at this stage. I also helped the teams sketch out their ideas into something more understandable and legible.
Then I facilitated a Speedboat exercise to identify Desires & Constraints.
Desires
Surface the most popular services contextually to the user. For example, if they are waiting for a Travel Approval or have to give approvals for team members, these would surface on the home page.
Provide some level of customization to bookmark/favorite specific pages.
Elevate the burden on Support staff by automating simple issue resolutions, FAQs and providing step-by-step guidance.
The mobile experience also needs to cover essential services like support.
Though Internal marketing communications was not desired by any participant it was not only a must have but required key real estate on the landing page. Employees did not know much about Honeywell's image in the eyes of the public and focused only in the own areas of expertise. Flooding our inboxes with emails so this was not an option anyone preferred.
Constraints
Redesigning existing service pages would be an unrealistic proposal
Bringing in an external service like Service Now at the time was out of the question.
If the PoC were to be funded the project would be outsourced.
The landing pg. will continue to remain on the default page of the browser.
KPIs will be calculated based on clickthroughs and NPS only.
Day 4: Prototype
After the 5 teams presented their ideas on the whiteboard, I spent a lot of time converting their ideas into design principles and then give direction to a solution. I then had to individually design a prototype to help visualize such a direction.
Several coffees later...
Design Principles
Opportunities minus constraints were crafted to the guiding design principles
I proposed an integrated services through APIs, allowing for a consistent user experience across services. The card-based responsive experience would also be easily viewable on Corp & BYOD mobiles. This would not require a redesign of existing services but creation of APIs and a new Mobile First interface with a shared language which follows the Design Principles we finalized.
The Result
A Contextual, Actionable, Informative & Responsive Experience
Contextual Cards
Having context of individual users, and relation to other users and services, it surfaces
To Do's and Quick Views to Status etc. through a Cards interface.
Each card lets the user jump into any next steps.
One Stop Support
Instead users trying to figure out which support team to reach out to, they will be able to use a single support interface.
A chatbot would resolve minor issues and provide walkthrough videos for self help. While complex problems would transfer to an agent of the respective service team to resolve the issue.
Contextual Search Results
& App launch/download links
& App launch/download links
Not only will you have access to your recent search history, you will be able to access popular searches based on the site you work at.
Look into popular searches of user groups such as your Teams/ Groups for eg. a Business Units, New Recruits, People Mangers, Product Owners, Developers, Electronic Engineers, etc.
Day 5: Test
We sent out the prototype to the already selected 130 candidates across Honeywell. Responses poured in I made observed patterns and made adjustments primarily in terminology.
By 8:30pm IST we had approval of the prototype and its features.
The Design Sprint was a success.
The Digital Workplace Project was given the green light
Post Outsourcing
The team overlooking the external agency's work informed me In the subsequent weeks that:
the existing Sharepoint framework did not support the PoC's Search feature.
Service Now will be looked into to see how best it can support the Support feature in the PoC
The external agency made no effort in categorizing the remaining links of the intranet. It was dumped in the Hamburger menu as an endless list.
That said all the other features of contextual and actionable cards that can be customized by the user were still part of the scope.
Reflections
Design Sprints are not meant to design or rethink ecosystems.
They are best used to make minor enhancement to a product or find a solution for an underserved use-case. I am certain that given the time for a deeper study we would have discovered many more problems and conclude with a better end to end solution.
My only regret is that I couldn't be there to guide the project once it was handed over to the external agency. They lost the essence and intent of the Design Principles & the Mobile First approach.
