Meridian Clinical Research; Employee Portal Case Study
"Zayne has been a huge help to improving the Employee Portal on SharePoint."
- Mohab Kassem
Getting to work with one of the top 2000 fastest-growing companies of 2022, and one that had such a huge impact on the COVID Vaccine and the world, was a truly exciting opportunity! They had grown from 130 employees to over 600 in just one year. Their Internal Employee Portal was hosted on a platform I'm very familiar with, Microsoft SharePoint Online or otherwise called Microsoft 365 Dynamics. The problem was, it hadn't been updated since it was made, and the Employee Portal was greatly overdue for a major change, it was slowing down everyone's workflow and making things harder for everyone.
That's why they hired me.
Step 1 - Empathize
Our first step was to Empathize with the users, we created a survey and sent it out to all the Employee's. Of course, it was optional so we only got about 120 responses, still that's a little over 18% of the entire company! This survey covered a number of key questions to get feedback on the current Employee portal. After this survey we then went to Department heads and got feedback from them, we interviewed four department heads, asking them questions about the current portal. What they liked, what they didn't like, what they wanted to see, etc. Gathering this data together, we started to define what our process should look like...
Step 2 - Define
We then had to define the core issues, gathering together the data from our surveys, and interviews. We narrowed down the core problems, filtering our data, then discussing what most Users felt needed changed.
"(The Employee Portal) is really hard to navigate and find information. It feels like we need a central person managing the upload of documents so that we are not duplicating, and so that there is a structure.
- Meridian Employee
Step 3 - Ideate
Now we need to come up with a plan, we discussed what pages would be needed and their hierarchy, you can see a Wireframe below of the hierarchy and we did a more detailed one for each page's design. An example is also posted below.
After creating a mock-up design for each page, I took the mock-ups and started to create them inside SharePoint Microsoft 356 Online. .
Step 4 - Prototype & Test
Prototype! We went through a few design phases, prototyping, testing, and refining. This happened a few times before we finally started to get a complete, final product, here's a screenshot of the Career's page!
After completing the testing pages, refining them as best as we can. We picked 10 people from the Companies employees, at least one or two from each department to test the new site out before launch! Then interviewed and sent surveys to them collecting their responses so we can asses any final changes, as well as how much it had improved.
Step 5 - Migrate & Launch
We are currently in the launching phase, more to come here in the coming weeks so expect a update soon.