Stephanie Mulvey
Citizens Advice Intranet
UX design / project management / UI design / information architecture / user research / facilitation
Across our national and local charities, Citizens Advice helps millions of people every year. Internally, we use an intranet to support our 30,000 staff members and volunteers. Before we initiated this project, users were forced to use 2 historic intranets with 7,000 pages of content - most of which were inaccurate, duplicated, and/or unnecessary.
As a multi-disciplinary agile team, we built a new intranet that would replace the 2 historical ones, making it easier for everyone to find the information, knowledge, and tools needed to do their jobs.
I led our product development team from discovery through to completion. Together, my team and I focused on testing, designing, and building our 3 'core pillars':
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making it easier for users to navigate the intranet - through new information architecture and search
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individual logins - to knit together several login-based systems and simplify the process for logging on every day
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increase accessibility for users of the site and implement our new design system
Since launching the intranet we've seen:
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90% success rate for users
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'double A' web accessibility rating
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the first fully live use case of the Citizens Advice design system in practice
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reduction in simple queries to user support teams
Intranet home page with national information structure
Understanding our users
Our users are at the heart of the intranet, and each has individual needs. As a user-focused team, it was essential for us to know our users and what they needed from an intranet.
Through our discovery, we gathered a better understanding of our user differences and similarities. With this knowledge, we built 3 user personas that covered our 30,000 users based on technical confidence.
These personas supported myself and my team through ideation and journey mapping.
User personas based on digital confidence and understanding of change
Personas in use identifying pain points and user wins throughout
Making complex systems easier
Working with our tech team simplified how users logged in to the intranet - removing the complexity of another username and password and utilizing existing systems that minimized the need for additional security with names and passwords.
User personas based on digital confidence and understanding of change
Building a new information architecture
Distilling 7,000 pages to 2,000 meant we needed a new information architecture to help structure content based on user needs. We started separating our users into 2 groups:
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staff members from national Citizens Advice
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staff and volunteers from local Citizens Advice
I led my team in developing a structure for each group. We tested these structures with over 700 users from usability testing, tree testing, and card sorts.
Card sort results and groupings
Testing analysis and iteration workboard
National and local information architecturres