Simplifying Complexity without Losing Power

The biggest challenge as Oomph acclimated to the tax-collection world was rapidly learning enough about the complex regulations and requirements of municipalities in the industry to provide sound advice and recommendations. We started by examining their systems — the workflow of documenting and planning new product features and adding them to the roadmap, of designing the UX of those features, and of leveraging their in-house design system to build and support those features. 

RSI’s main product, GOVERNMENT PREMIER, are highly customizable and configurable. Every single screen has options that would display depending on the authenticated user’s role and privileges and the tenant’s own back-office processes. User stories included many requirements based on permissions and configuration. This added challenges when imagining potential interface solutions that need to accommodate growth in multiple directions. 

Oomph’s purposefully used our outside perspective to ask many questions about GOVERNMENT PREMIER’s processes. We took our years of experience designing interfaces for a wide range of consumers and applied them here. In this typically slow-to-evolve space, a user-focused experience coupled with GOVERNMENT PREMIER’s technical expertise would revolutionize tax collection as a friendlier, more intuitive, and highly customizable experience.

Maintaining Consistency in a Rapidly Evolving Product

Our findings and recommendations indicated previous UX teams did not create a rulebook that governed their decisions, and so, the system lacked consistency. Quality Assurance reviews would suffer from this lack of governance as well. Therefore, the first thing we did was to establish rules to design by: 

Ultimately, these rules are flexible and have served well as a starting point. Any new screen can adhere to these rules, and when we find cases where these rules are preventing users from completing their tasks or are frequently confusing users, we revisit them to make updates or clarifications. Oomph has continued to consult on new screen design and UX workflows after more than a year of working together.

Setting a New North Star to Align Our Compasses

To continue to move the product forward without increasing UX and technical debt, the teams needed a well-defined shared understanding for the user experience. Internal teams were moving forward, but not always in the same direction. Within the first month, our teams agreed upon a playbook and then continued to expand it during our engagement. We met twice weekly with product owners across the company and became a sought-after resource when teams were planning new features.

During our time together, we have celebrated these outcomes:

As Oomph moves into our second year collaborating with the GOVERNMENT PREMIER teams, we plan to fully investigate user personas on both the admin and taxpayer side of the platform, add more context and governance to the project designs, and provide quality assurance feedback on the working application. We value our partnership with this unique team of experts and look forward to continuing the tax software revolution.

Oomph has worked with Lifespan since 2010 and created the second version of their intranet on Drupal 7. A critical tool like an intranet needs regular maintenance. Even with regular updates, there comes a time when the whole platform needs a re-architecture to be flexible, secure, and performant.

In 2021, it was time to plan the next phase of the intranet on Drupal 9. Lifespan used the redesign as an opportunity to realign the employee journeys with the evolution of their work. And COVID-19 had provided an opportunity to reevaluate whether a security-first, HIPAA-compliant intranet could be available to those working from home.

Critical Top-Tasks

The Oomph team ran a Discovery and research phase to gather requirements and understand employee expectations. We ran workshops with client stakeholders, identified important work tasks and created 5 employee personas, conducted one-on-one interviews with key persona types, and gathered feedback from employees with an online and email survey. 

Through this research, we started to see two different types of tasks emerge: those that required speed to a destination and those that required exploration and unstructured browsing.

Tasks requiring speed to completion:

Tasks requiring unstructured browsing: 

It became clear through our process that Lifespan employees needed to move quickly and slowly, often in the same session, depending on the important tasks they needed to complete. The intranet needed to support both types of journeys to remain a successful platform for getting work done and absorbing company culture.

A Focused Priority on Search

Expectations about fast and accurate search are high because of you know who. When designing search for an employee intranet, the baseline requirements are even higher. We knew that we had to get the design and implementation of search right. 

We took a learn-once, use-everywhere approach when it came to search interfaces. Search would be a core part of finding many types of content — tools, forms, people, departments, locations, and more. Each had to have a similar structure and set of filtering options to be the most useful. 

The list of tools, locations, or people needed smart defaults. Before someone conducts their own search, each screen displays popular searches and the common content people need to access. In some cases, an employee does not even need to search in order to find what they need.

Two search pages, similar interfaces: The Job Tools search and Staff Directory follow similar patterns, adhering to our “learn once, use everywhere” rule

Personalization that follows Employees from Device to Device

Personalization had to be a part of our solution as well. Employees are able to use S.S.O. to access the intranet from their personal devices or workstation computers in the hospitals. Workstations are often shared between multiple clinical staff, therefore, our system needed to support stopping one task on on device and picking it back up on another.

A Favorites feature allows employees to create their own transportable bookmarks. Almost everything on the site can be bookmarked, reducing the need to search for commonly used content and tools. Six custom favorites are available from the left drawer at all times, while the entire list of favorites is one more click away.

Supporting Speed and Engagement

Speed is at the heart of critical tasks and high-quality patient care. A nurse, at a shared workstation, needs to log in quickly, find the tool they need, and administer care. Time is critical. They don’t want extra clicks, a search that doesn’t work intuitively, or slow page load times. Staff don’t want it, and management doesn’t want it, either. 

Engagement is slower and the intention is different. Speed is for tasks. Engagement is for exploring. This is how company culture is communicated and absorbed. This is when people catch up with department and company news, find events to attend, view a photo gallery from an event they missed, or browse a bulletin board to swap items with other employees. You can’t have an intranet that is ALL business just like you can’t have an intranet that is NO business.

A Dashboard Built for Speed or Browsing

On the starting page, an employee might be in need for something immediate or might have time to explore. We do not know their intention, therefore, this page needs to support both. 

The left drawer is open to employees on the dashboard. It is open to show them what it contains and to remove a click when accessing the important common destinations within. The first seven links are common items for any employee, curated by the Lifespan team. They are a mixture of tactical items — like time sheets — and company culture items — like the CARE recognition program. 

Below that are the employee Favorites. The first six favorites are shown while all are available with an extra click.

The top navigation supports speed to common destinations, some of which are search interfaces and others which are built for browsing. 

The rest of the page showcases engagement and company culture. Featured news stories with images are balanced with quick news and event lists. Flexible content sections allow authors to add and remove content blocks as new items are required. 

Other content pages that were focused on engagement are the deeper News and Events pages, customized Location pages (for each major hospital location), and a community Bulletin Board.

Smooth Onboarding and Acceptance

No matter how confident our teams were, we didn’t really know if the redesign was a success until employees moved from the older tools they were familiar with. The Lifespan team did a fantastic job creating walk through videos ahead of the launch. Old tools and directories stayed available for a period of overlap, but our teams saw quick adoption into the new tools in favor of the familiar. 

Since the intranet is now available off of the closed Lifespan network, we have seen mobile traffic increase dramatically. The responsive design is an improved experience over the previous intranet and the numbers prove it. In fact, we have found that more employees engage in company culture content on their personal devices, while using the company workstations for their tasks. 

Oomph is very proud to have worked with one of the largest private employers in the state, and we are very proud to have our work used by over 17,000 people every day. Oomph continues to support the Lifespan team and the intranet project, iteratively improving the features and evolving the toolset to be effective for all.

Powering Design With User Feedback

MLH exists to help Massachusetts residents find information to solve common legal issues, like securing public benefits or fighting an eviction. To ensure every aspect of the site was grounded in the audiences’ needs, MLH wanted to incorporate feedback during the discovery and design phases from real people who fit MLH’s primary and secondary audience profiles.  

By performing a thorough discovery process — including working group interviews, visitor interviews, cohort site analysis, and wireframe and prototype testing — Oomph was able to create a successful site design dedicated to the needs of visitors.

Helping the Audience by Understanding Them 

MLH shares insights on heavy topics ranging from housing and homelessness to money, debt, and immigration. The site contains sensitive information that could change their visitors’ lives; by connecting them to domestic violence help or resources to get their children back, for example. When Oomph first jumped into the project, our main goal was to step into the shoes of their user groups to better understand their needs when they seek legal information.

The main audience of MLH is Massachusetts residents who are primarily low-income and may not speak English as a first language. They use the site to become informed about legal issues they’re facing quickly and efficiently. As one visitor stated:

 “I’m coming here because I have a problem. I want to know, where’s the search? What can I do here? What can I not do? Don’t waste my time making me read [fluff]…”

To meet this need, the MLH team provides information in plain English at a fourth to sixth-grade reading level, rather than using complicated lawyer jargon, which makes it accessible to a wider group of people. Additionally, many resources have been professionally translated into other languages, such as Spanish.

The secondary audience that visits the site is those who help the primary audience, such as social service providers, legal aid lawyers, and legal librarians. Oomph had to walk a fine line by getting feedback from the secondary audience to help inform information about the primary audience; however, our main goal was to ensure that low-income and non-English-speaking people could find the answers they needed.

Gaining the Audience’s Trust with Thoughtful Design Details

We learned that many visitors found the MLH website by searching Google with their questions. Many primary audience members would visit the site on their mobile phones, perhaps even listening to its content with their text-to-speech tool. This increased the importance of a mobile-first design so the pages loaded quickly, the information was clear, and the experience made sense for mobile browsing.

A Modernized Design

The site’s look was outdated, making some visitors feel that it either lacked credibility or didn’t contain the latest legal rules and laws (even though it’s been actively maintained and added to for the past 15+ years!). For the Oomph team, the final designs had to walk a fine line between being authoritative, trustworthy, and comforting. To achieve this, we retained the blue color palette but created slightly softer tones to help create a calming aesthetic.

Our team also limited the amount of photography on the site but ensured that any photos we used represented the diverse groups MLH serves. Icons became a tool to guide the visitor through different topics; regardless of the visitor’s language, the icon could help them understand what information may be within that particular topic.

MLH has also accumulated a lot of content over the years. To help organize its search and topic organization feature, we incorporated content filters according to the information type: articles, how-tos, e-books, and videos. Each category has its own icon, and each icon is represented by a color. This helps unify the search based on the type of content the visitor is seeking.

Color Contrast and Accessibility

From the start, MLH made it very clear that their new designs should comply with both 508 and WCAG 2.1 guidelines — ideally conforming to the highest level of contrast, level AAA. As Oomph created the color palette, we were careful to use only high-contrast colors and document how to use them in a system to ensure that the palette satisfied accessibility guidelines. 

Supporting the Content With Tools

MLH had several existing tools to assist in digesting content. During our discovery phase, we validated the need for these tools and upgraded them. For example, on the content pages, there are options to print, share, listen to the content, and even switch the language as the visitor lands on the page.

Within the main navigation menu, the design included a “Quick Exit” button. This supports visitors who need to abandon the page when, for example, a domestic violence survivor’s abuser re-entered the room.

We cultivated a passion for this feature through our research and have written an article detailing our best practices for implementing a quick exit button. Additionally, we have created a Drupal Module for this feature so that more people can implement this important tool for sites with sensitive content.

Findability of Content Through the Main Menu Navigation

On a larger scale, the primary and secondary navigation menus needed an upgrade. As it stood, the main categories were wall-to-wall across the desktop, and it was hard to determine where a visitor needed to go. The secondary navigation menu read like a table of contents in a chapter book and didn’t allow the visitor to return to other categories. 

We solved for this by creating a survey to test a proposed navigation structure and revised the information architecture (IA). This included a new top menu that supported every step of our primary audience’s journey. We also created a level of navigation that directed visitors to the information they were looking for, no matter how they entered the site. 

Search

For search, we used a multi-filter approach which allows visitors to search both by topic and by content type. This filtering allowed them to find questions that might belong to multiple categories, and to narrow down content to the types they are willing to review.

Proactive vs. Reactive Enhancements

Analytics and user interview results showed that most visitors start their journey on either the homepage or pages that are three or more levels down the navigation. Many also reach the site via a specific Google search. While it is likely they found what they needed, they may not be aware of other information that can help them. To mitigate the risk of bouncing away from the website, we created a “Viewers also reviewed…” component on answer pages that showcased related content more naturally.

Repeating Help Footer

Above the footer, we created a “safety net” to help visitors who have browsed the site for a long time but have not found what they are looking for. If they reached the end of the page, this footer would direct them to more content that may hold their answers.

Previously Viewed

We added a “Previously Viewed” section at the bottom of content pages to remind visitors of the content they have already reviewed. This reduces the burden on the visitor when they ask themselves, “I think I’ve seen that already, but I can’t remember where I saw it.”

A Modern, Helpful Website Design

Through prototype testing with our first design mock-up with real visitors, the participants individually determined that the new site’s design and content organization was easy to navigate, gave them a trustworthy impression, and looked appealing. Today, the MLH website is live with a fresh Oomph design. We hope the structure and design will continue to not only keep visitors on the site longer but also help those visitors find the legal answers that they need.

Have a project that requires a human-first, empathetic approach? Consider talking to Oomph about incorporating user feedback into a user experience-focused design project for your next website refresh.