Hudson’s Intranet Redesign is a Success and Sylver Helped to Make It That Way

It’s with great pleasure that I get to share the success of a past project that we’ve worked on.

Three years ago, Hudson, an international staffing, recruitment and talent management company, started an initiative to redesign their intranet, believing that it should and could be a productivity tool for the organization. To help define which functionality should be embedded in the new site, they hired Sylver Consulting to support them in understanding the “sales” culture of the organization and identifying the unmet information needs of their employees.

Sylver Consulting used Innovation Research techniques, primarily ethnography, to understand the workflows and challenges of varied roles, functions and departments across the North American offices of the organization. We intentionally did not ask employees for feedback on Hudson’s existing intranet or ask them to hypothesize what they might like to see in the redesign. We simply watched them work, saw their real work challenges and then suggested ways that the intranet could help to fill those information gaps.

That upfront work has paid off! Hudson launched a Beta version of their intranet back in June 2009. It’s gotten such positive reviews from the North American division of the company that they’re beginning to introduce the new platform and functionality to their other Global regions this month.

To quote Kris Rzepkowski, Director of Interactive Marketing in North America at Hudson:

“The ethnographic research provided by Sylver Consulting on our employee behavior and work styles set a foundation for the success of our intranet launch. Everyone in the organization found it worthwhile to have a much deeper understanding of our “sales culture” and what that means to our intranet approach. For the entire development cycle of the 3-year project we were able to refer to the research every time we had questions on how to focus functionality, design and content around our user needs. The end result was a well-received intranet launch. To quote one user, ‘I thought this was the way our intranet should have been 3-years go’. Thanks to Brianna’s high-quality research, and our user-centered design principles, that’s all we need to prove success!”

With out question, Hudson’s new intranet is more engaging and provides employees with the tools to boost productivity. The highly customizable new platform encourages collaboration and makes searches fast and precise. Check out some of it’s key functionality in a video created to help with the launch of the Beta site this past June.

You can also read more about the site’s Beta launch and development on Kris’ blog here.

Categories: Customer experience, Design, Ethnographic research, Innovation, User-centered approach