Chris Kaminski

designer

Deutsche Bank Intranet Support Portal

Content model
Concept model

The client had an extensive IT infrastructure managed by diverse groups around the world. Each group managed their own intranet site. The client estimated fragmented online support cost them 0.5 hours of lost time per week for each of their 77,000 users. I was asked to design a way to make the content navigable without re-building the entire intranet.

I served as lead on a team of two. We inventoried 50 existing sites, then used techniques like the KJ-Method in stakeholder workshops to better understand the sites’ uses and priorities. I combined our findings with intranet metrics and the client’s internal surveys to develop a conceptual model of the way users thought about IT problems.

Diagram of the content tagging model
Tagging content

Using the concept model as a guide, we developed a faceted navigation system that accommodated different users’ mental models and allowed the system to adjust results in response to analytics. The tag-based model allowed individual site owners to do much of the work to integrate their pages, avoiding a large centralised IT project. While the other designer fleshed out our taxonomy, I created a series of diagrams to communicate the design to site owners. We also used our research to help prioritise sites for integration.

Diagram of the content location model
Locating content

The client was delighted with the concept, and I handed the project over to the other designer to develop a prototype for testing. User testing went very well, with only relatively minor changes to the taxonomy required before delivery of the final design.

Product map
Product map