Challenge:

Designed & built a communications portal for Intuit's Waltham Massachusetts Office.

Biggest Achievement:

Worked with all levels of the audience to create an informative, inclusive, socially-engaging home for 300 employees.

Technical Challenges:

Leveraging Intuit's proprietary online database (QuickBase) as the back-end repository, learning both Perl and XSLT within the 3-4 month project.

Method:

Gathered requirements before design began by visiting the Waltham Intuit site to interview potential users. Talked to several different employees in one on one interviews, to discuss their feelings about the current site, its positive and negative aspects, and how it could improve. These interviews served as "personas" throughout the design process.

The existing site was reportedly "too dry" and didn't inspire social interaction. During interviews, determined the biggest barrier to using the site as a social medium was that content was too stale and wasn't applicable to employees' daily lives.

The new site continued to deliver required department information and self-service tools. However, it also connected their daily news and event calendar to Intuit's web-based QuickBase content management system. Since employees were already accustomed to using this tool for project tracking, the new site drastically increased employee's access to add content and events to their intranet portal.