Ministry of Home Affairs Headquarters, Singapore
UX Research
UX/UI Design
Usability Testing
The Ministry of Home Affairs Headquarters (MHQ) had an intranet platform that all its employees used frequently for their work, from finding out standard operating procedures (SOPs) to applying for leave.
However, the current intranet was poorly designed, outdated, hard to navigate, and lacked many desired functionalities. They needed a refreshed platform with a new design and new features that could help them in their daily work.
Redesign the intranet to enable staff in MHQ to access important documents and information more easily.
Discover what new features would best help staff in their daily work as well as fulfill stakeholder needs. Design these features into a user-friendly web interface that improves on their current platform.
As one of only two UX designers on this project, I participated and contributed significantly across all stages of the design process, including user research, design, and usability testing. It was my very first comprehensive project as a UX designer, and served as an excellent training ground for me to learn how to contribute to a large, end-to-end digital platform redesign.
I assisted my team's UX lead in conducting several focus groups with Ministry staff to understand the problems with the current intranet, as well as what the staff would like to see improved or added in a new, redesigned version of the intranet.
I single-handedly analysed and summarised information gathered in the focus groups, and designed a clear, comprehensive report to guide the design direction of the new intranet. This report was distributed to the client stakeholders and design/development team.
After features and improvements were agreed upon based on the data gathered from the focus groups and stakeholder interviews, I worked with the other designer on the team to design a homepage and subpages for the intranet.
After my team had designed several options for the intranet homepage and presenting them to the Ministry committee in charge of the project, an important stakeholder declared that she didn't like any of the design options presented, and in fact, disliked our entire approach. After much back-and-forth comments and heated conversations, we discovered that what the stakeholder wanted was a more flashy, photography-heavy homepage that had plenty of visuals promoting the events and community in the Ministry.
However, according to our user research, actual Ministry staff cared little about community and event news, and were much more interested in using the intranet to quickly access work documents and guidelines. These were the design requirements we had, until then, been working with.
In order to appease the important stakeholder and still meet real user needs, we pushed the community news section (with images promoting the events) to the top, and in usability testing, showed through eye-tracking that users did not look at that section at all, and tended to scroll right past it to the more work-relevant sections.
Armed with these findings, we reached a compromise (seen in the first screen design, below), where the event section was at the top, but much reduced in size and was not too much hassle to scroll past to access other sections.
To ensure the usability of the new design before development, I planned out a usability test script with tasks for users to attempt to complete - tasks that accurately represented real actions that staff were likely to take on the intranet. We created a clickable prototype of the designs using Invision for the purposes of the usability test. Me and the other designer then led one-on-one usability tests with 16 Ministry staff members.
After the tests, I single-handedly designed and wrote a comprehensive report detailing the findings of the usability tests, including recommendations for improvements to the designs. The designs were then amended with the usability test feedback in mind, and handed over to the developers for implementation.
I learned a lot about dealing with demanding clients and balancing good design with internal stakeholder wants. Often, what the heads of department wanted was different from what the staff actually needed the intranet to do, and my team and I realised the importance of coming to a compromise in order to move ahead with the project while not neglecting real user needs.
I gained a better understanding of how to work with developers without a design background - how specific you have to be with design in order to get it developed accurate to your vision. Many times, developers neglected small design details that changed the look and feel of the interface, which we then had to highlight to them as important.
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