The making of a Nielsen Norman top 10 Intranet
AIG Case Study — What does it take to be selected for inclusion in the Nielsen Norman Groups “Best of” annual best of review?
AIG Contact was designed to enable the following core functionalities:
- Employees must be able to access global, local area, and divisional (business unit) communications
- The corporate hierarchical structure should be represented
- Employees must be able to access all policies regarding the terms of their employment and practice areas
- Promoting the culture and community of AIG
- The enablement of the digital workplace, using a task fulfillment paradigm, including file-sharing, information management, and single sign-on to workforce applications
- Management of the employees personal relationship with AIG. Benefits, online-learning, career advancement, time reporting, etc.
- Secondary functionalities included regular updates on AIG’s evolving relationship with the FED, and guidance on how AIG employees could represent the brand in their public and private lives.
Design Concepts
We arrived at the look and feel through many rounds of increasingly refined conceptual explorations. Here is one early example exploring a network of intranets for the different business groups, and a personalized sidebar for the users tasks and ongoing conversations.
Final design:
The Mobile Experience
In developing mobile solutions, you always have to contend with a much higher prioritization for the essential tasks. With offices around the globe, hundreds of cities, and multiple locations within metropolitan areas, the people finder functionality needed to deliver more than contact info, to aid inter-office visits.
It's always too complicated to try to call someone, find out their location, and find out how long it will take to get there
Here's the approach we took in developing the wireframes. All the style stripped away in favor of task focused utility, with Travel Services and on-the-go expense reporting pushed right up to the top, in the People Search results screen, we added map integration with a single tap.
All our research pointed to an overwhelming preference for 3 top mobile tasks: people search, travel assistance, and expense reporting. In order not to take anything away, you can still access the three main sections of Contact — News, Workbench, and HR (Life & Career, but they are pushed back a layer.
