The Intranet Nobody Could Use
Diagnosed an intranet organized around departmental ownership rather than user behavior and proposed a structural redesign to fix it
Built stakeholder buy-in across six competing departments using research, not opinions
Conducted user research that surfaced the insight driving the entire redesign. Employees described their own behavior in three words that became the navigation model
Redesigned the information architecture of a company-wide intranet on Microsoft SharePoint, working alongside an outside development agency
Delivered a task-based navigation system that became the most-visited section of the intranet
Result: employees across the company bookmarked the new section as their personal homepage
Organizations See Themselves. Users Just Need to Work.
I find the gap between how an organization sees itself and how the people inside it actually experience it. Then I close that gap in a way that makes both sides feel understood.
That instinct -- to start with behavior, not assumptions -- has followed me into every project since. It doesn't matter if the problem is a company intranet, a SaaS platform, or a loan processing workflow. The question is always the same: what are people actually trying to do?
The Problem Nobody Had Named
Everything Was There. Nothing Was Findable.
When I joined a major financial services firm in Denver, HR was emphatic about one thing. Use the intranet. Don't call people. Don't bother your colleagues. The answers are all online.
So I tried to use it. I wanted to figure out my commuter options. Parking pass or RTD transit pass. What I discovered was that parking passes were owned by HR and transit passes were owned by Facilities. Two separate corners of the site. One simple question.
When I asked my manager about it, I heard the same story I'd hear again and again in my career. Departmental infighting. Every team had planted their flag. The intranet was organized around who owned what internally, not around how any actual human being would think to find anything.
Gaining Buy-In
Start Small. Prove It. Then Go Bigger.
Before I could pitch any solution I needed proof the problem was real and some political cover to actually fix it. Every department head wanted their content front and center. Nobody wanted to give ground.
My first move was small and fast. I redesigned the homepage on the existing system as a proof of concept, then ran an A/B test feeding the new version to half the company at random.
The new version won by a wide margin. Now I had data. And with data I had stakeholders willing to let me keep going.
