Intranet/Extranet

The Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA) operates nine provincial agencies, including BC Children's Hospital and the BC Cancer Agency. It is also responsible for specialized provincial health services like trauma, telehealth and thoracic surgery. On a province-wide basis, PHSA plans, coordinates and evaluates specialized health services and works with the other health authorities to provide equitable, cost-effective healthcare.

PHSA had an employee intranet that was in need of an overhaul, and hired ADGi to help create a blueprint for a redesigned site that would include a detailed site map and wireframes.

For the first phase of this project we conducted user and stakeholder interviews. The aim was to understand what key tasks users needed to complete in a given day/week/month and how they went about their information retrieval. Based on the research, a content audit, and data review (PHSA had conducted a user survey prior to this project), ADGi developed a strategy document with recommendations for the redesign.

Next we developed the information architecture. Findability on the site was a key issue identified during the user research, so we used our proprietary testing tool, NavTester, to conduct iterative navigation testing of the site to ensure that the right structure was developed. Thanks to internal recruitment and promotion, the response rate to each iteration was over 30%, far above typical response rates to surveys. Anecdotal feedback we heard from the PHSA team was that the navigation testing had created a positive buzz and people who had not been invited to participate in the survey were asking to do so.

We then created the site map and wireframes for the redesign. These were received with very positive feedback from the PHSA team and project sponsors. The resulting design has 15 topic areas. A ‘Yahoo-like’ index on the home page is unusual and breaks the 7 plus or minus 2 rule: it is assumed that people cannot remember more than 7 items at a given time and navigation structures should have no more than 9 top-level categories. The navigation testing we did showed that users were able to find the information, quickly and easily even with 15 top-level categories.

PHSA launched their redesigned intranet, using ADGi’s design approach, in November 2008.

BC Hydro was switching to a new content management system and had decided to use the opportunity to seek funding for site redesign at the same time. They hired a consultant to create the blueprint for the redesign. While the consultant delivered a blueprint document, the information architecture solution was found to have issues after usability testing was conducted by a second consultant. BC Hydro hired ADGi to help them fix the information architecture in preparation for content migration.

Given that two consultants had previously worked on this project as well as the content management system vendor, there was little appetite or budget to do the work. Staff had no tolerance for more discovery meetings, user interviews, or surveys. At this stage they just wanted the problems fixed.

Given the limited budget, ADGi decided that a two-staged approach, working directly with the Intranet Manager, would work best. The first stage of the process was to create a site map of the existing site. Typically, we would have created a content inventory in a spreadsheet but in this case we chose to create a visual map of the existing site. The benefit to doing this was enormous as for the first time the Intranet Manager could easily visualize the site. For the second stage of the process, we worked collaboratively with the Intranet Manager to, first, adjust the proposed IA to something that would meet the user needs (which had been defined loosely in the existing blueprint) and, second, move blocks of pages to fit the new structure.

As with most intranet sites the solution is a work in progress. BC Hydro has a framework that is flexible and can be modified as the company and employee needs evolve. The Intranet Manager and successive team members understand how the structure works so that future changes can be implemented without the help of a consultant.