My biggest project ever, yet I did little design work on it. Instead, I was the instigator and project manager. Focusing on the user experience alongside managing, I was able to succeed on this project thanks to the help of skilled, flexible, insightful colleagues. This is the story of the CEI Hub.
When I was hired on at Eastern Idaho Technical College (Became College of Eastern Idaho aka CEI in 2017), I was one of two staff members who know basic web coding, and was given control of the employee intranet. It was from the early 2000s, and operated more as a dump site than a resource.
Unnavigable, complicated, and broken, this thing was a nightmare to “manage”. What was more, is that this was the best thing we had. We had an outsourced webmaster that barely communicated or completed even small tasks for our website.
I had two wonderful interns from our web development programs assist with the intranet. One halved the amount of files and cleaned up all the broken pages and links. The other went out of his way to attempt to work with our webmaster to better address needs, but this didn’t end well.
For five years - and through a lot of professional soft skills development - I spoke and presented to Deans, Directors, and other helpful allies in my workplace about the intranet situation. I knew through my own knowledge, research, and conversations with professionals, that the intranet was the perfect test project to show why we needed a web development team in-house.
In Spring 2021, my appeals to Deans and Directors finally lined up with funding; I had until December 31st to pull a team together and launch a new employee resource site.
There were a few deals and requirements to this project from the start.
1. This is a step between outdated intranet and a functioning employee portal as a resource, and it should be seen that way from the start.
2. We needed a committee after launch as well, to keep the project on track with its goals, and to prevent it from becoming a dump site.
3. If it is successful in its goals, a web developer would be hired to start out a new department. One of their major goals the first few years will be the portal.
Of course, I was just the passionate employee who cared and got others to care. I needed this to be interdisciplinary to succeed. The team consisted of:
A security engineer from IT
An IT colleague who did minor freelance web coding
A paid intern from the nearby university, who would be graduating right after this project’s deadline and already had a job lined up
An older colleague who was horrible with computers
A younger colleague who was fresh to the workplace
The tenured instructor who assigned the intranet's creation in 2001
As a full team:
Our goals were:
1. A campus-wide employee resource, with
2. excellent usability for even employees bad with tech, and
3. low maintenance upkeep on the committee's side
There was also the issue of pain points we could predict, based on experience with the intranet:
Balancing security vs. accessibility
Keeping it from being overwhelming with the amount of files
Getting colleagues enthused to use the resource consistently
As the project manager, I spoke to all members of the team on their concerns and challenges with tasks. We had weekly meetings to assess progress, and to discuss issues everyone needed to know. I also often took the time to help research solutions and back up what different team members needed everyone on board for.
For example, our security engineer and intern took a while to come up with a compromise on the issue of security: this website had no login, but it could only be accessed on employee computers on campus.
After a few weeks, I regrettably left for maternity leave, but I came back to the team proceeding just as I left it, with the website nearly done. I was in time to help with one of my favorite parts of any design project: user testing!
Near the end, I spent most of the time explaining the value of user testing our product, including bringing in a user for demonstration and talking about the test afterward. We also covered what makes a critique constructive, including a tester’s spoken responses compared to their actions during the test.
After educating the team on user testing, we made up a pool of demographics to seek out as testers. These traits were men and women, from Boomers to Gen Z generations, from incompetent technology users to IT employees.
Each member of the team had to test 3 people initially (18 total per round), submitting a detailed rubric and summary of the test and responses to a Google Doc.
After 3 rounds of user testing and revising the website, it was ready.
At our Fall In-Service, cooperative employees submitted potential website names anonymously. We talked very briefly on the project, as we were expected to speak on it at the Spring In-Service in-depth.
Afterward, we looked over the entered names. Some were obviously there for fun but not to be used - like s.n.a.f.u. - and others were very similar and it came down to wording.
This was handed over to my own department, Creative Services, to run through branding and visual concerns as well as seeing what the most popular ideas were.
We ended up with the Hub, leaving more school spirit names like “Falcon Nest” for the future. The Hub received its own logo, a simple spin-off of our sun dot.
On November 1st, the Hub launched. There were no hiccups, which was far better than we expected. Employees who forgot about the Hub’s uses just took a little reminding, and it took a burden off many backs. I for one was quite happy to not need to find the correct path and navigate my coworkers over the phone to the right page, as I constantly did with the intranet.
A few months in, and the new website was working beautifully. A web developer was hired and kept very busy with the vast amount of needs that could now be answered. We integrated a catalog enterprise software on the website to reduce hours and errors drastically, and keep information consistent throughout the main website. And when I left in Summer 2022, a portal for students and employees alike was in the works!
