The process of designing one of the biggest, European intranets — a project which was realized for an energy company called TAURON. The presentation is more than a typical case study – a complex and interesting story about the UCD process in the context of a huge organisation. What you will learn: - How to use the UCD process in designing huge systems (eg. intranets)
 - How to conduct research to better understand the context of the organisation - The typical obstacles organizations could meet on their path, and how to avoid 
them. - Difficulties in designing for the energy industry 
 - How to manage these types of projects

1. THE STORY BEHIND TAURON’S
AWARD WINNING INTRANET
INTRANÄTVERK 2015
Hubert Turaj & Marcin Kręcioch

2. _
THE PROCESS

3. EMPLOYEE CENTERED DESIGN (ECD)
UNDERSTAND
DESIGN
TEST

4. _
MEET TAURON

5. VALUE CHAIN
TAURON group consists of many different
departments and subsidiaries. Their employees
have quite specific needs.

6. HUGE AREA OF OPERATION
TAURON operations cover the whole south of
Poland. Employees need to travel often and
cooperate in geographically spread teams.

7. HISTORY OF MERGERS
TAURON emerged after several mergers of
smaller energy companies what is still reflected
in the structure of some of the IT systems.

8. OLD AND NEW
Some of group’s subsidiaries already had
intranet systems. They had to be analyzed so
no impotant feature was skipped.

9. _
UNDERSTAND

10. SURVEY
IN-DEPTH
INTERVIEWS
BENCHMARK
USER TESTING
EYE TRACKING
STUDY
Analysis
Concept
Mockups
Implementation
Spec
Designs
USER TESTING
WORKSHOPS
ETHNOGRAPHIC
RESEARCH

13. ETHNOGRAPHY
Research inspired by ethographical methods
helped us to understand the organization and
everyday tasks of employees from different
fields.

14. NATURAL ENVIRONMENT
Look for post it notes, printouts, private
notebooks and excel files – these are the best
candidates for optimizing company processes.

15. Big picture
SURVEY WITH 3000 EMPLOYEES

16. Difficulties with finding
interesting informations;
653
Too much content; 119
Too much graphic; 36
Complicated site structure;
256
Complicated depatments
naming; 177
Unfriendly layout;
142
Difficult language of the
site; 57
Too small font size; 137
Too slow page loading;
348
Which of the following problems do you
encounter when using the intranet?
Finding right
information

17. Difficulties with finding
interesting informations;
653
Too much content; 119
Too much graphic; 36
Complicated site structure;
256
Complicated depatments
naming; 177
Unfriendly layout;
142
Difficult language of the
site; 57
Too small font size
impade the reading; 137
Too slow page loading;
348
Which of the following problems do you
encounter when using the intranet?
Long
loading
time

18. Difficulties with finding
interesting informations;
653
Too much content; 119
Too much graphic; 36
Complicated site structure;
256
Complicated depatments
naming; 177
Unfriendly layout;
142
Difficult language of the
site; 57
Too small font size; 137
Too slow page loading;
348
Which of the following problems do you
encounter when using the intranet?
Complex
structure

19. Rate frequency of use of different
intranet’s functions
News
Contacts
Org.
structure
Templates

21. NEW EMPLOYEE
HELP WITH ONBOARDING
One of important aspect that employees
mentioned during research was difficulty of
getting on board. To help employees take off
faster prepare the list of necessary activities
and answers to typical questions.

22. _
DESIGN

23. GOVERNANCE
Every section should have person responsible
for taking care of the content – either creating
it or making sure that the content prepared by
somebody else is clear and up to date.

24. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
CARD SORTING
When organizing the content for such a big
system, card sorting excersises are
indispensable. They allow to create the right
structure and get the naming right as well.

25. WIREFRAMES
Prototypes of most important sections and
screens are great tool for discussing the
content and the structure of the future system.

26. VISUAL DESIGN
The design followed brand guidelines but had
some details different to clearly mark the
difference between the web portal and the
intranet.

28. FLEXIBILITY
The design is based on the grid that can be
adjusted in an elastic way giving some freedom
to the editors.

29. RESPONSIBILITY
SOCIAL SUPPORT
Every employee can report that the article is
out of date. It can be done through easy to use
form placed next to every article.

30. 270 LOCATIONS

31. INFORMATION ABOUT MEETING
ROOMS
Information about meeting rooms include its
capacity and equipment e.g. beamer – this
feature is a direct answer to the need
discovered during research.

32. _
TEST

33. SURVEY
IN-DEPTH
INTERVIEWS
BENCHMARK
USER TESTING
EYE TRACKING
STUDY
Analysis
Concept
Mockups
Implementation
Spec
Designs
USER TESTING
WORKSHOPS
ETHNOGRAPHIC
RESEARCH

34. USER TESTING
We conducted three sessions of tests. First two
took place in our lab while the third one was
carried out at Tauron’s offices.

35. FIND CONTACT TO IT SUPPORT
EYETRACKING
This method gave us additional feedback
regarding the behaviour of the users and
confirmed our design assumptions.

36. ABBREVIATIONS
Employees use the abbreviations everywhere
but the search engine was not optimized for
them. Only after the tests with real content this
issue was discovered and fixed.

37. _
AND PROMOTE

38. 25 INTERNAL PR MOVIES
20 SCREENCASTS
„MAKING OF” MOVIE

39. RESPECT THE PROCESS AND
EMPLOYEES’ NEEDS
…AND EVERYTHING ELSE WILL FOLLOW

40. follow the process
understand peoples’ needs
understand the organization
care for basic business needs
design for special requirements
design for change
make it fast
use checklists