Large Government Financial Institution 

This large Government Financial Institution is headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, and serves Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and portions of West Virginia.  Their Intranet serves as a vital link for these employees providing them access to silos of information.

The Challenge

As our client looked toward the future and integrated their Intranet site with Interwoven, they sought to establish their Intranet site as an effective employee communications tool serving their various audiences. The goals for the redesigned site were to:

• Develop an information architecture to help users locate information they need quickly and provide a scalable foundation for growth of the site.
• Produce an updated look and feel to make the site more engaging, useful and informative to users.

The Solution

Many people contributed to the 1,500+ pages of content for the site. Users of the Intranet include all internal employees of the Institution as well as users from the other, external, Government Financial Institutions. With so much content available and so many users accessing the site with different needs, the organization and naming of the pages had to provide for intuitive and efficient navigation of the site. As users continued to rely upon the Intranet as a central exchange of information, integrating data from all relevant Richmond departments, the site had to be user-friendly, engaging and informative.

The overall scope of this engagement was to provide the Bank with information architecture and design tools that will allow them to develop the HTML pages and execute the site implementation. Specifically, Ironworks performed the following:

• Conducted end-user research to determine existing challenges, opportunities, and needs.
• Performed a target audience analysis, deployed a user survey and created user profiles.
• Identified opportunities for ease-of-use through navigation, page layout and visual design by applying best practices and addressing user needs.
• Produced information architecture which helped users find information they need quickly and easily, and provided a scalable foundation for growth of the site.
• Developed the creative strategy to guide messaging & visual design and ensure alignment with business objectives.
• Analyzed current and proposed content to make recommendations for content organization.
• Created design concepts and design elements to make the Web site more engaging and informative.
• Performed usability testing to validate label testing and ease of navigation.
• Provided Interwoven training to Bank Staff as well as guidance in developing workflows, and input and presentation templates.
• Transferred knowledge to the Bank’s team by providing creative artifacts, production ready graphics, cascading style sheet and style guide.

The Results

In addition to being recognized by the Nielsen Norman Group as one of the Top 10 Government Intranets, our work provided the Institution’s staff with an intranet presence that:

• Utilized Web technology to improve user satisfaction and communication and reduce manual document dissemination.
• Improved the ease with which multiple groups of constituents acquired and utilized multiple sources of information.
• Provided for scalability and for future functionality additions.