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Transforming the intranet experience for employees through a user-centric redesign, introducing a new homepage and strategic feature enhancements that tackle user pain points for an enhanced experience.

MTA Intranet: Elevating Employee Experience

Product Designer

My Role

Kavuri Venkanth

Paula Alleyne

Laiba Sarwar

Julia Kim

Mitra Raveendaran

Team

​2023 (2 months)

Duration

Ideation
User Research & Synthesize
Sketch
UI Design & Prototype
Client Feedback & Redesign

Process

A revision of the current MTA Today Intranet Site for MTA IT that addressed the user pain points through the new homepage and features that I designed.

Objective

Transportation

Industry

Product Design

Task

Figma

Miro

Tools

Revamping the MTA Intranet involves creating a unified platform for all 70,000 employees, addressing issues of outdated information and feature visibility. The redesign focuses on a dynamic homepage with regularly updated content, including MTA Today, board meetings, and multimedia. Navigation will be streamlined, prioritizing quick links and implementing a user-friendly search feature. This approach aims to deliver an intuitive, engaging, and informative intranet experience, fostering improved communication and usability for MTA employees in the field and office alike.

Solution

Problem

The current MTA Intranet site poses significant challenges for the 70,000 MTA employees, both in the field and office, by lacking a cohesive platform for accessing calendars, updates, and department-specific news. Users face issues with outdated information, difficulties in finding essential features, and a lack of uniformity across different agency intranets.

Previous Website

The previous version of the site was operational. It did, however, contain pieces that were no longer in use or required. It also included visual elements that were not included in the new branding guidelines.

01. DISCOVERY

Research and Interviews

Research played a big part in this project because it helped me understand what features are needed and what are not. It also helped me understand what MTA workers need and want for their Intranet website. 

We decided to send a survey of qualitative and quantitative questions and interview 16 people who asked about the process and the features they would like and what aspects of the process they want to improve.

Competitive Analysis

Alamade One
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The current navigation menu for the Intranet site is easily distributed and organized.

Outlook
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The side menus and the announcements are a great touch and the overall header menu is simple and well laid out.

02. IDEATION

User Personas

Lo-Fi Prototype

For the second draft, I switched the background to grey and the content to white so that it no longer interferes with the bottom navigation. I also added the color guidelines and added some content to continue the wireframes. 

While user-testing these wireframes with the team and 8 people, I received feedback that I had to make a cleaner interface so I could add more icons to make information more concise.  

03. TAKEAWAYS

  1. While interviewing and creating user stories, the goal of the website was more evident
  2. Went through weekly design stand-ups to revise the designs and make sure they coordinate with the users' goals.
  3. Understood Information Architecture and used card sorting techniques to make sure the navigation was clean and organized.
  4. Further learned prototyping and key research and design techniques in Figma.

Reflection

Future Steps

The new intranet website went through more iterations and the development team has made it live for each internal employee at MTA IT

Final home page with quicklinks, videos and resources for the employees.

The new navigation is grouped more for organization and resources to make it less clustered than before. 

This new calendar pop-up will let employees see upcoming events and holidays. 

Hi-Fi Prototype

While user-testing these wireframes with the team and 8 people, I received feedback that I had to make a cleaner interface so I could add more icons to make information more concise.  
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For the final design, I went back to the research and realized that videos of the shoutouts were more needed than people contacts on the home screen. I also realized pop-ups of the calendar and upcoming events shown below. I have also redesigned the navigation by grouping by subject and adding the prototype.
Link to the prototype in Figma. 

Initial Wireframing

After looking at the guidelines and the previous website, I grouped the navigation and the elements that I wanted to add after analyzing the user research. 

User Flows

Old Website User Flow
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The previous website had 7 navigation items and a few were very similar which made it hard fo users to see where to go for certain tasks.

New Website User Flow

The new website flow has an improved layout and structure with fewer parent navigation and more dropdowns to help the organization based on user research.

What are the features you use most often? Do you have any pain points when using these features?
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  • Read the MTA Today main news article. The information is static. Used to get new articles everyday. Articles are displayed for days at a time. There is nothing to lure people to back to the site if you see the same information day after day. Information is outdated and not maintained the way it should be. The organizational charts are out of date. Not everyone has access to the site.

  • The ones I use most are the Kronos applications everyday. I do updates for pay, timekeeping, promotions, schedule changes, supervisor changes, org chart changes everyday. I run queries on people soft for new hires, retires, and fellows and move all the data we're gathering onto the MTA IT website. Pain Points: Sometime the Kronos application doesn't work so we have to wait till they reboot. The reason for this is because there was a ransom software attack and it was down from December to March. Since a lot of people are using it, it is slow and the open a ticket. 

  • I find there is a lot of stuff that’s difficult to find (searching for people), you have to know what you’re looking for to get it done. The info is never updated. Lots of clicking (not good at directing the user form page to page). Instead of directing to a powerpoint why not show it on the page. No way to go back to the home page (MTA today). 

Are there any specific features we don’t have on the existing site that you would like to see on the new site?
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  • The site should be more dynamic and less static. The design should be more modern and fluid.

  • For me personally, the org charts for any department. I have to make a lot of phone calls to find out who works in what department and who they report to. I think across the board should have an updated org chart so it's easier to find people.  A lot of the operating staff do not have emails. They don't have phone numbers and there is no number on the website for departments like subways and railroads. If you're trying to contact bus people, there needs to be a general number and email and a general name for the person you're trying to name. All the agency's intranets are different. Information is not the same and all the intranets for all agencies should have the same information. It's hard to find a policy. A policy within a policy, within a policy. It's not very user-friendly and organized, the cosmetics should make your life easier when working. Even for new hires. There's no link for new hires.

  • It’s confusing to know what portal I’m going to know what I want to find (maybe add a table of contents/map) 

What improvements or enhancements would you like to see on the website?
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  • MTA Today should always be the first thing people see when they start their computer. Everyone should have access to the site including people in the field. Needs a usable search feature. 

  • The bus people. I was trying to work in the Brox over the weekend and could not find any general information about the bus people there even with a search.  We're a transportation agency so either we're taking the train, railroad, or subway but that information is not visible. I couldn't find the bus department information and even the employees couldn't. Have a general number for the field/operating departments. And when you go to search it doesn't work. We need more information for the operating department. If something is going on send a blast so we know. I was trying to go home and there was something wrong with the train and there was no blast. None of the employees knew. We have an intranet, and we need to put it on the Intranet. We are also the customers so let us know what is going on with the trains and buses. Need live data on the intranet. We use the buses and trains to go to other places for work. It will help us plan our day so we need live updates of operations. 

  • ​Put quick links in the top right, put the home page in landscape mode, and make it less scrolling.

Key Interview Quotes

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