Client

Ausgrid

Agency

Designit, 2023

Role

Senior Experience Designer

Overview

Impact

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The Challenge
In analysing the current state of the employee experience at Ausgrid, a significant portion of survey feedback highlighted user experience issues with the current intranet. Employees reported difficulty in navigating, searching for information and completing administrative tasks.

Designit was engaged to conduct research with employees to understand the current challenges of the intranet, with the key objective of defining the intranet’s future user experience. 
Ausgrid’s ultimate goal is to develop a centralised hub that equips employees with all essential information required to carry out their roles effectively.

This project has been instrumental in elevating Ausgrid’s intranet user experience.

• Our wireframe designs and strategic recommendations have empowered Ausgrid to implement UX improvements systematically.

• By focusing on human-centric design principles, we helped Ausgrid enhance productivity and foster a more positive employee experience.

• This initiative marks a significant step forward in Ausgrid’s ongoing efforts to cultivate a streamlined and user-friendly digital workplace environment.

The Approach

We worked closely with Employee Engagement leaders to understand the problem context and engage in collaborative research activities with employees.

Through 1:1 interviews and a comprehensive UX audit, we identified pain points and usability issues within the existing intranet. Utilising complementary research methods such as card sorting and tree testing, we explored and validated a new Information Architecture.

To showcase the envisioned user experience of The Wire, we designed a set of page templates, a navigation system and search features which were integrated into an interactive prototype.

Card Sorting

We used open card sorting to start from a blank canvas and broaden our insights into users’ mental models. After our interviews, we realised we needed to use the employee’s knowledge to help us redesign the IA. It was too complex and niche for us to create the labels. We set up 42 cards based on our interview findings and Google Analytics data, we prioritised labels that referred to highly mentioned tasks, pages that were high traffic, covering themes across all the current categories.

Card Sorting Learning

Participants categorised information based on the following criteria:

• Informational versus task-led content types

• Organisational versus personal relevance

• Frequency of use

Tree Testing

We validated our initial Information Architecture using tree testing.
Planning the test also came packed with challenges:

• The tasks were hard to write because of how specific the content is

• Not all tasks were relevant to the participant’s role

• We aimed to have questions covering all categories created

• We targeted popular actions and high-traffic pages for the tasks

• We intentionally put forward questions covering content categorisation that we were uncertain about what we were proposing

Tree Testing Learnings

The most significant insights of the tree test were taken from the task-by-task analysis. 
By drilling down on each task’s data we were able to iterate on groupings and labelling of sub-categories that didn’t perform as well as others.