On designing an intranet at Citrix
If you really want to clean house, get a bigger trash can
In 2014 I worked with a small team to redesign the intranet for Citrix’s 10,000 employees. The existing intranet—pieced together over the company’s 20-year history—was not great…
Really:
Not:
Great:
In my role as content strategist, I started the redesign process by working with a designer and a developer to define the basic structure and interactions. We knew we wanted a responsive site with a mobile-first approach, so we quickly agreed on a progressive disclosure technique that would make the content less overwhelming…
The site resized itself for any device:
And collapsible sections made it more scannable:
. . .
The essential framework in place, I then moved on to the hard part: working with executive stakeholders across the company to rewrite two decades worth of HR documentation.
Adding to this challenge, most of the material was held captive in an eccentric range of PDFs that were near-impossible to read on a phone:
And so, I began to cut ruthlessly, leaning on the Pareto principle (which suggests that 20% of the content yields 80% of the value). Of course, striking the right balance took a bit of practice, and the first section I edited went through 18 rounds with stakeholders:
this is what iteration looks like
Eventually the process sped up considerably, however, as I got better and as others got more comfortable with the 80/20 editorial strategy. But this transition definitely took a while, because of course it’s hard to throw things away, it’s so much easier to give in to the hoarding temptation and save everything just in case.
Still, if the goal is to unburden HR by instilling a DIY attitude in employees, it’s an impulse that must be resisted. If you want people to take the initiative, you have to present them with something that feels manageable — human in scope, rather than corporate in scope — even if that means sacrificing some of the more arcane details along the way.
. . .
When the redesigned intranet launched in early 2015, the reaction from our colleagues was immediate:
• In the first two weeks the site had 250,000 page views and our Support team experienced a 16% drop in calls
• Rebecca H. said, “Great job! I actually found a Citrix benefit today that I didn’t know existed!”
• Harihara S. said, “Great interface with quick easy access to critical information!!!”
• Laszlo U. said, “This is the best looking and most intuitive intranet I’ve ever seen.”
And then, some time later, we won these:
Gold Quill & UX Magazine awards