The essential steps in designing the perfect intranet dashboard
A clever intranet dashboard gave PTV Customer Call Centre staff access to all the systems they need in one place, with a single secure login.
Image 1: Laptop screen showing a high-fidelity desktop wireframe of the PTV Customer Call Centre dashboard.
The challenge
The Call Centre, Customer Hub and Customer Relations staff at Public Transport Victoria (PTV) were relying on shortcuts and hacks to find information from many different systems to answer all their customer questions.
They approached us to find a streamlined, secure, accessible solution for their customer service intranet that would save them from opening and logging into different systems, keeping dozens of browser tabs open and flipping between multiple windows.
They were struggling because:
Basic content was difficult to find – their old CMS and legacy systems were clunky and hard to use and maintain
Call centre staff were under considerable time pressures to answer caller queries and relied on hacks and workarounds to locate frequently-used content eg. having multiple bookmark tabs open at any one time
New hires found it difficult to navigate the plethora of unintuitive internal and external systems and manage all the workarounds.
“We need access to information as fast as possible, customers are impatient, they’re in a rush”
What we did
As with most of our projects, the technical solution for this platform redesign involved a combination of people, processes and systems.
Our dashboard development process ensured all those factors were taken into consideration, with people kept firmly at the centre of every phase.
Image 2: Dashboard development process
The dashboard development process and timeline of major stages: content audit, UX research, strategic planning, UI design, development, CMS management and simplification.
We include the right people at the right time to get the information our whole project team needs
In our projects we always include the right people at the right time. Due to time constraints of the project we involved representatives from the end-to-end project team, including developers, to participate in the UX Discovery phase. This approach saved time as the need for UX research to Developer handovers was reduced and improved outcomes as developers were able to hear end-user pain points first-hand and develop solutions that would deliver impact.
We use a range of a different activities to understand the challenges
Several UX activities were conducted as part of the UX Discovery phase:
On-site UX Observation at the PTV Call Centre saw our UX Lead and Lead Developer spend a full day observing Customer Service staff in action engaging with customers and the intranet. This experience was enlightening. We saw the rapid pace of the call centre and the fast-turnaround time pressure these staff members faced, which emphasised their need to find the right information quickly. We saw staff routinely had 10+ tabs open at any given time as this information was difficult to find on the intranet.
On-Site Co-Design session bringing together three different groups of users to better understand their intranet needs, the current problems they faced and their ideas by co-design solutions. The 1.5 hour session was incredibly productive and delivered insights that highlighted the:
Unique environments for each user group – while ultimately there to provide support to customers, the approach, time frame and environment in which each group operate in differed
Different content needs of each user group – a simple activity asking participants to highlight relevant information in the content-heavy knowledge page, immediately showed us that user groups have different information needs and do not need to see all options
Varying time pressures each user group faced to find relevant information e.g. on-site customer support staff assist customers who are time-poor, in a hurry and need information fast, compared to the Customer Support team who dive deeper into customer issues and may have weeks to research and provide customer updates.
Users are included in development of the solution
As part of the UX Solution phase we conducted a variety of tasks including:
Information Architecture card sort – to ensure the intranet’s navigation menu was informed by end user insights our UX Lead conducted an open card sort using Surveygizmo. The open card sort enabled participants from selected user groups to create their own groups categorising items through labels.
Tagging and keyword analysis – insights from the card sort revealed the keywords users expected to see when searching or looking for relevant information. These keywords were analysed and included as a list of recommended tags for the client to use as we know a robust taxonomy and tag system came directly improve the user’s ability to search, locate and relay information fast.
Lo-fi mockups to gather feedback – lo-fidelity wireframes (ie no fancy graphic design, just bare-bones designs showing the features – see image below for an example) enabled us to conduct lean user research. We aimed to group information intelligently in obvious locations, with obvious labels.
Doing lo-fi usability testing this way gets great results and saves time and re-work.
Image 3: Lo-fidelity desktop wireframe
Lo-fidelity mock-ups like this one encourage users to discuss functions and their locations on a page, without getting distracted by the graphic design of the page.
We get to know the end users and keep them in mind throughout the whole project
When developers and testers are involved with end users from the beginning, they understand their issues in a deeper way and naturally consider the real people involved as they move into the strategic planning, UI design and development phases.
A simple yet sophisticated search function is essential
The final step in our process of developing a customisable intranet dashboard is to create a simple yet sophisticated search function.
Image 4: Hi-fidelity desktop wireframe showcasing the dashboard for the Customer Call Center staff.
High-fidelity dashboard design displaying information from a range of different databases and systems, enabling users to customise all the content and its locations on the dashboard.
The result
Uncluttered, simple, efficient. That’s the intranet we delivered to PTV staff.
The new dashboard looks clean and modern, is searchable and customisable, functions beautifully and can adapt to future changes.
Rather than opening and logging in to different systems, keeping many browser tabs open and flipping between windows, PTVs secure, accessible dashboard gives staff members everything they need in one location, along with the ability to customise their dashboards.
UX Recommendation report – our invaluable super-report of user insights helps guide future projects
We always extract as much value as possible from everything we do. The UX Recommendation report we developed during this project collated a range of user personas and a thorough list of practical considerations PTV can apply to this project and future projects.
Customisable dashboards increase response time
Each user group can now customise their intranet dashboard to get the information they need within seconds.
PTV staff no longer need to jump between systems and pages – they now have a single dashboard of customisable cards, repurposed widgets, quick links and favourites on their intranet.
New employees can rapidly come up to speed (and stay in the role) using the intuitive new dashboard
From the beginning of the project we focussed on new users and ways to enable them to rapidly come up to speed when starting work with PTV. The new dashboard was designed to be intuitive so new employees can quickly understand where to find the information they need.
The dashboard provides a single, reliable source of truth
PTV staff can confidently rely on their intranet dashboard as a single source of truth, rather than getting frustrated working through duplicate search results or having customers tell them they’ve seen or received different information.
Re-usable widgets enable customer service staff to insert specific functional areas from the public website onto their dashboard, so they’re both seeing the same information, presented the same way, in real time, without jumping between the intranet and public website.
Clear on-screen notifications about important news and events replace cumbersome and easily-missed email updates
On-screen notifications mean staff are no longer relying on information coming through in a separate email system and potentially being missed or seen too late. Simple icon-based notifications can be sent to specific user groups, who can customise how they appear, so they never miss an update and never need to leave the intranet to find more information.
A centralised notification banner highlights important information which has been pushed to relevant user groups. It also displays the user’s local weather forecast using data pulled from open weather map API, as our research revealed extreme weather events such as flooding can increase the likelihood of customer calls relating to delays.
‘...you can filter out what's not relevant to your everyday activities’
– Co-Design workshop participant 007
Information is easily shared and set to remind users to review it, so it never goes stale
The system automatically highlights content that has grown stale, enabling authors to provide relevant updates at all times.
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