overview

The global navigation of the Federal Reserve Bank intranet was put in place by an external vendor over 10 years ago and never took in consideration users.  The problem we set out to solve was, how can we adapt it to complement our search engine and make it flexible to adjust for new content in the future.

research

I started by talking to the admin team to try to understand the challenges and wants out of a new navigation going forward. A key finding here was the fact the current navigation at the time was intended to be a task-based navigation.

Then I conducted some contextual inquiries to undertand where our employees had issues and collect any other anecdotal data, and interesting find here is that depending on the years of service, employees look for information using a dept-based mental model.  After that I did a first round of card sort to see where they were grouping information.

analysis and testing

I analyzed the data based on the two sets of data points I had, and after taxomony work I put together a proposed navigation organization.  I went back and validated my new solution with another round of card sorting.

results

The end result was a not only a new navigation scheme; but a new hybrid one (task - dept based) and one that allowed for future placements of initiatives that would also complement a segment of our population that prefers using the search bar.