As part of my internship over the summer, I was tasked with updating
and restructuring my division’s website. The goal was to create an environment that
drove users to click through everything, check regularly, and learn more about
activities going on elsewhere in the company; in essence, the ideal product
would draw on users’ desires to explore and understand. To accomplish this
goal, we needed to assess why the current website was failing to do either. We
quickly found that the current site was difficult to navigate. The site had
information from various departments scattered everywhere, possessed faulty
links, and reflected outdated company information. In this regard, the site was
going unused because employees were not able to understand the site’s layout or
acquire new information through exploration.
In our redesign of the website, we cleared out empty links
and aligned new links in accordance with a hierarchical design. To enter our
new site, users have to navigate to the division home site which then spirals
down to department sites, each possessing their own subsites. This modification
allowed users to explore the site while maintaining a clear understanding of
where they are in the site and how to return to a “safer” more well know area
of the site by backtracking to the home site. Similarly, this setup allowed
users to develop competence in navigating our site by observing how it is
structured.
Finally, to ensure that employees kept coming back to our
site, we notified all employees that sites would be updated weekly and
delegated the responsibility of each site to a different person. Employees
continued to check back because they knew there would constantly be new
information to learn and a wider area to explore.
In this project, our team focused on driving engagement by
appealing to the innate drives of our employees. However, our site still lacks
a strong appeal for employees to participate in online communities. How could
this be approached in the future? Furthermore, what steps could be taken to
reduce the demand of our website and, more broadly, technology on direct
attention?
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