June 2009 - Dec 2022

PepsiCo Intranet Portal

My Role:

Lead UX Designer and Product Owner

Skills Used

Ideation, IA, Interactive Prototyping, UI Design, User Research/Testing, Visual Design, Leadership, Communication

I was the lead UX designer on this project for 13+ years. During that time we replaced the existing aging portal with a completely new solution that we built largely in-house from the ground up. Today the portal has served over 300k unique users, 100+ countries, and is available in over 20 languages. It is my biggest success story so far in my career.

Chapter One: Triage

Challenges

Upon joining the portal team, I inherited an existing solution that the team was looking to improve upon. I was presented with a couple of key issues right away:

Improve turnaround time for design work
Improve design aesthetics
Improve overall usability

Research

The team was anxious to get started and felt they had already collected sufficient feedback from their users so there wasn’t much appetite for extensive research (a common challenge as a UX designer). So, my initial approach to research was to:

Personally conduct an expert review (i.e. heuristic evaluation)
Conduct a few casual interviews with content owners and local users.

What I Learned

The interviews revealed that some potential content owners were hesitant to bring their content onto the portal because they were not impressed with the aesthetic and therefore were either keeping their content where it was or looking for an alternative solution. I also learned that current content owners were overwhelmed with the page creation process as it was too unstructured and therefore not user-friendly.

Design

Based on information gathered from the interviews and the heuristic evaluation I determined that focusing our efforts on heuristics #4 (Consistency and standards) and #8 (Aesthetic and minimalist design) would achieve the most dramatic positive results. Over the course of the next few months, I completed the following design activities:

Created templates to standardize layouts and eliminate page holes
Designed a new look and feel that utilized a high gloss, candy aesthetic that was made popular at the time by Apple on their website and OS.

Continuous Improvement

Over the course of the next few years, I continued to improve on the MyPepsiCo experience as time allowed between other projects. Notable improvements included the following:

New portlets and portlet redesigns to improve utility and usability - most notably those that integrated functionality from other systems
Nav bar redesign
- From non-fixed to fixed for easier access
- Minimized height to allow more visible screen real-estate to content area
- Consolidated separate people and info inputs into one input for better usability
Redesigned search experience
- Introduced a suggestive search dropdown
- Improved advanced search experience
- Redesign search results experience to resemble google search results to increase familiarity and improve usability
Redesigned homepage to allow for more personalized and customizable news blocks

Chapter Two: A Fresh Start

Challenges

After years of repair and continuous improvement, we were beginning to push the boundaries of the solution and felt limited in our ability to innovate and take the UX where it needed to go. The Communications had been our primary sponsor, business owner, and product owner but we were losing them because they were putting their time and money into a new independent news solution. This left IT as the business owner and myself as the product owner. This was both a curse and a blessing because although funding for anything beyond maintenance would now be a challenge, I finally had the opportunity to play out my vision for the portal. I approached my manager with the following fundamental issues, all of which were having a detrimental effect on the search experience among other things mentioned below:

No common taxonomy or content model. This was limiting our ability to relate and recommend content and was due to the fact that there was no infrastructure for it.
Content trapped in portlets. Instead of using portlets as a window into an independent piece of web content, portlets were being used to administer and house content directly. Content created in this way is not reusable and adversely affects the search experience.
Too much content in files. Files are unexpected on the web and make for a bad user experience. The portal was not providing any real way for authors to write and manage good quality web content.
Lack of governance. Lack of standards and oversight led to old, redundant, and inaccurate content.

Research

The items mentioned above were my observations and hypotheses, but I needed to confirm them through research. I and two other team members conducted approximately 15 interviews with a mixture of content owners and end users from different divisions across the company. The overwhelmingly dominating sentiment was that people could not find what they were looking for because:

The navigation mega-menu was bloated and contained too many irrelevant links
The search results were irrelevant
Content wasn’t trustworthy because there were too many pages and documents with out-of-date and incorrect information.

Design

The decision was made to start over because we had outgrown the old system. My UX team collaborated with a new solution architect, the dev team and an outside IBM partner agency called Base 22 to start designing and building a new solution from the ground up. We would have to take a lean start-up approach because we were not funded to create a new from-scratch solution. The new solution would be powered by IBM Websphere Portal and Web Content Manager. The improvements that we would focus on were:

A new information architecture
- Global taxonomy
- Local taxonomies
- Site map
- Navigation scheme
A new authoring experience and capabilities including templates by content type and more
A new atomic design system
A redesigned profile experience
Multilingual capability
Governance with principles and pattern guidance
- online governance documentation
- weekly site owner forums
- and more...

Chapter Three: Sponsorship & Globalization

Goals

After shepherding the new intranet solution, called MyPepsiCo NextGen, for several years we believed we had a stable solution that was ready to take on offense. Our goals were:

Gain sponsorship to finance significant expansion
Identify and onboard all remaining functions and sectors currently relying on siloed solutions
Sunset the old MyPepsiCo portal

Opportunity Knocks

Two big shakeups in leadership brought about a great opportunity. New department heads in Comms and HR both expressed interest in bringing their services and content back into the MyPepsiCo portal. This would be the sponsorship we desperately needed. These leaders were not necessarily familiar with or even aware of the the new MyPepsiCo NextGen. And although we were eager to introduce and sell it to them we had to be strategic about it. We needed to listen first.

Design Workshop/Sprint

We decided to conduct an in-person, three-day, design sprint workshop with twenty-two key stakeholders from Comms, HR, and IT. Our goal was to establish some credibility and learn about some of the needs of each organization, concerns with the old MyPepsiCo solution, and gather ideas for a future solution as they envisioned it as individuals. The format we followed was called "Perfect Day".

Day 1

Hands-on ideation that had participants draw concepts for their perfect intranet experience then present their concepts to the group and vote on their favorites. Several rounds of this resulted in a prioritized list of ideas to explore. I served as a co-facilitator on this day. Here is a short video from that day:

Day 2

On the second day, I and another designer from my team created low fidelity interactive wireframes to address the top priority items identified on day 1. We realized that several of the items identified could be combined into one concept: a unified, integrated, aggregated, smart “first-stop”. In other words, a homepage that was highly personalized and wasn't just news.

concept 1

concept 2

Day 3

On the third day, we presented the designs back to the original group for feedback, but not all were able to attend, most notably the head of HR who had sponsored the workshop. For those who were able to attend, the feedback was positive.

Outcome - Another Workshop

The workshop and resulting concept designs spurred a lot of interest and healthy conversation in the weeks following the session. We were receiving a lot of indirect feedback and direction from the head of HR, Ronald S., but we had questions, so to make a long story short, it was decided that we would need another workshop with a smaller audience of key stakeholders, including Ronald, so we could receive and discuss his vision directly. This turned out to be a two-day participatory design session. On the first day, I presented a competitive analysis I had prepared, reviewed and discussed the mockups that had been generated from the first workshop, and white-boarded revisions and new ideas. It was a healthy, full day of conversation. That evening and into the next morning I incorporated the days' feedback into a new high-fidelity interactive prototype. Below is a static version:

Time to Introduce MyPepsiCo NextGen

The mockup above was very well received and after two successful ideation workshops, the stage was finally set to introduce MyPepsiCo NextGen. After a relatively brief walkthrough of the solution, I believe Ronald's words were "Why don't we just use this, it is already here and it has what we want." So there it was, it seemed we were going to get the sponsorship we desperately needed to take MyPepsiCo NextGen to the next level!

In the weeks following our participatory design session with Ronald, the wheels began turning to establish new ways of working with our new partners. The homepage mockup that was at the center of it all made its way up to the CEO. The feedback that was handed down was that it was great but the aesthetic was a bit too "cold" and "corporate". We were asked to partner with the PepsiCo Design Center to freshen it up. The Design Center rarely works on web projects. They are mostly focused on product branding. I coordinated this effort but acted as a design consultant, not the lead designer. Below is the resulting design and the one that is still used at the time I am writing this:

Conclusion

In some ways, my journey with the MyPepsiCo intranet portal ended the day we secured the sponsorship we worked so hard for. I was no longer the product owner. A steering committee was formed to identify and prioritize the future evolution of the portal. I took a year off the project to focus on a stretch opportunity in another part of the company and although I was not as directly involved in the project, members of my UX team still worked on designs as needed. Efforts were focused on truly globalizing the solution. This meant shutting down any remaining siloed portal solutions, finally retiring the old MyPepsiCo and migrating all that content, owners, and audiences to the new solution.