Fixing the Intranet

After grad school I joined Cisco systems, as part of their intranet design team. After years of toil overhauling a morass of fragmented and poorly maintained 3rd party wikis, blogs, and employee forums, the team was being recognized for their hard work with the opportunity to scale their efforts into a b2b product. 

We aspired to unify Cisco's suite of collaboration tools into a fully integrated, dynamic social intranet.  Together we built a one-stop "intranet in a box" called WebEx Social. 

Goal

• Get buy in to design and build a social intranet in-a-box 

• Leverage Cisco's portfolio in phones, WebEx, and telepresence products to create an integrated experience. 

• White-label the product and make it possible to deploy to any company as a b2b product.

Role

• Researcher, Design Lead, Product Strategist

• Lead designer for Team Spaces (Communities), Corporate News Feeds, File Sharing, Distributed To-Do lists, Backend IT tools, and other projects. 

Result

• Our product became WebEx Social, the web based platform for our ~$38M Investment in collaboration technology. 

• Two patents for social intranet design. 

Process

Bootstrapping the project

The seemingly dry subject of intranet design turned out to be a mine field of political and logistical traps; every SVP wanted tight, silo'ed control of messaging to their team, while simultaneously bemoaning the lack of visibility into other teams, citing poor cross-company collaboration as the biggest obstacle to their success. Worst of all, it was clear that most enterprise intranet decisions were made entirely by an IT manager negotiating piecemeal contracts with vendors like Atlassian or Jive, with little to no input from the employees who would actually be using the systems. 

Research and Persona Creation

The political turmoil we encountered made clear that we needed to dig below IT management to actually understand the needs of knowledge workers a large company. 

I conducted focus groups and interviewed dozens of employees about their present and past experiences and pain points: 

I created a set of personas that helped frame discussions from an explicit employee perspective, rather than just what "the company" thought they needed. 

Design Strategy

Taking the results of the workshop, I started articulating a strategy for how we could begin to understand the user's needs and actually design something that could help them. 

I made poster-sized affinity diagrams and plastered our workspace with them. I drew comic-style user flows showing how different roles in the organization worked (or didn't work ;) together to produce an outcome, doing my best to understand and explain complex organizational structures that were new to me.  

For a company accustomed to selling routers and switches (i.e. mostly invisible to users), this was an eye opening approach to articulating the real world problems that their employees were having. 

Design (finally)

Once we agreed to the broad strokes of our intranet system, our design team divided up the work and set ourselves to building a product we could use first internally, but then be turned into externally facing b2b product. Our internal intranet replacement was ready one year after we had initiated the project, and WebEx Social shipped a full year after that. Between designing and building for an functioning intranet and then doing it again for a product team, I executed and shipped 15 different projects; the two most interesting are highlighted here. 

1. Building working Communities

My first assignment was to lead the Communities track, designing a tool that would let different teams quickly create a presence on the intranet (akin to Facebook Groups or Basecamp). The current solution was a fragmented web of one-off custom sites designed for each business vertical, each different in branding, purpose and function. 

Our research had abstracted some of the core information needs for employees in a team space: 

• Who is on my team? 

• What tools do we use and where are they? 

• What shared informational resources do we have? 

• Where can we talk? 

• Who else do we work with? 

Keeping these user goals in mind, I spent a week sketching and socializing my designs across the wider team. 

In collaboration with our team of designers building other aspects of the intranet system, we completed the v1 launch of our intranet. These designs served as a foundation for years of work that followed. Over the next three years I designed the soup-to-nuts experience of the Communities spaces:

• Click to Create Flow - avoiding duplication, creating default templates, defining permissions structures in an easy to understand way.  

• Team Templates - Default layout template and base functionality (such as membership, file sharing, discussions, and news feeds) given to every team. 

• Content Management tools - Easy retrieval and organization of the myriad of assets that could be generated by the system (posts, files, wikis, links) 

• User engagement - Community building tools such as member management, home page customization tools, templates for different team types. 

• Community Management - Back end management software to identify and archive abandoned communities.  

Result: One year after being deployed internally, over 3000 community spaces had been created, with each group customizing their page to contain just the information most relevant to their team. The forums in each community space eventually displaced the fragmented Jive/Clearspace and vBulletin forums that had been in use in the company prior to the unification. Communities continued to serve as a major component of the b2b product. 

2. fixing corporate news

My last project at Cisco was to resolve a long-standing dispute about the corporate news feed on the user's home page. Our internal communications teams were accustomed to having a static intranet home page with hard fought screen real estate carved out by each org for internal messaging. When we moved to an activity-based feed, most of this real estate was supposed to be replaced by feeds about actual work. 

But this didn't happen. For nearly two years we watched a stalemate between the corporate news team and departmental news teams. Our activity feed had been pushed below the fold by an encroaching "News" section that contained two feeds; one for Cisco, and one for the employee's department. This was obviously less than ideal for employees who already had too many feeds to check each day. 

A problem in every company

We found this was a problem in almost every company. Control of the intranet home page was a common source of political strife, as an executive news team would find themselves competing with department heads from every single org for employee mindshare, each amplifying their message until the intranet home page became something to ignore, rather than a place to get work done. 

Unified Feed

First I set out to unify the feeds with a deceptively simple single front page news feed solution. The value of this approach was non-controversial as everyone hated having two news feeds on every user's home page. The bulk of the work came in explaining just HOW the feed was populated and how everyone would benefit. 

fair and balanced (!)

To that end we developed a flexible news/blog publishing system and an algorithm that would appropriately weight each and interleave news stories, ensuring the feed would be maximally relevant from both the employee and employer perspective. Users could dynamically load new stories, dismiss stories, subscribe to multiple feeds, and all of this information was provided back to the publishers so they could see which stories were having the most impact in the company. 

After months of cajoling, presentations about engagement, and testing to validate that the feed would actually treat everyone fairly, our internal stakeholders finally agreed that the new feed was more scalable and fair. Cisco employees were able to use the intranet to do actual work, and the product team rejoiced that the main activity feed could take center stage on the intranet home page again. The final product became a key component of the WebEx social update that . 

After months of cajoling, presentations about engagement, and testing to validate that the feed would actually treat everyone fairly, our internal stakeholders finally agreed that the new feed was more scalable and fair. Cisco employees were able to use the intranet to do actual work, and the product team rejoiced that the main activity feed could take center stage on the intranet home page again. The final product was brought to market as a key component of WebEx social. 

PRESS

Great intranets - Cisco Systems