BACK
ROLE
Design Lead
CLIENT
Delta Air Lines
INDUSTRY
Aviation
PLATFORM(S)
DATES
Sep 2014 – Apr 2016
ENGAGEMENT TYPE
PROBLEM SPACE
SCOPE
UX/UI, Architecture, and Front-End
MEASURABLE
IMPACTS
60%
425
99.94%
Executive Mandate
Following a multi-day outage of their intranet, the CEO pushed the company to overhaul the Deltanet site in both technology & design.
Aging Tech Stack & Design
The systems and software behind this corporate communications portal had reached end-of-life and needed to be upgraded. Similarly, the design of the site had evolved over the years but it still lacked an intuitive and engaging interface that catered to the needs of the user.
Lead Designer
I served as lead designer for this project, overseeing the visual design and supporting the client's in-house UX designer.
Front-End Developer
As a SharePoint Administrator, I was responsible for configuring the site and using SharePoint Designer along with custom code to build-out and support all front-end UX and advanced styling.
Building off of previous versions
DeltaNet was designed to provide a one-stop platform for Delta's employees, partners, and retirees who are looking for internal company information and access to other systems and tools. After their previous version crashed in 2013 and had a two-day outage, the company realized it was time to update both the front-end and back-end technologies that powered Deltanet.
All things considered
Considering Deltanet already had a base to build from, my team and I were given a lot of runway to envision what an enhanced version of the platform might look like. Using a blue sky design approach, I proposed several conceptual designs featuring unique features that reflected the travel experience through motion design & micro-interactions. Although most ideas went unused, it was a great exercise for myself and the client to consider the possibilities.
Information Architecture
Redefining Delta's IA and content strategy was a major part of the planning process for this project. During the discovery phase, I helped lead a card sort activity and several planning workshops with the client to guide the creation of the site topology, content types, and site metadata.
Exploring page layouts
During the design stage, I facilitated weekly sessions with the Corporate Communications team to design, critique, and review page layout templates.
Mobile responsive design
Deltanet prioritized responsive design to accommodate for the workstations, phones, tablets, and kiosks throughout their organization. With Microsoft SharePoint being Delta's content management platform and at a time when SharePoint did not natively support optimized mobile design, I had to implement custom code to enable a responsive design across all devices.
I created several conceptual prototypes for a mobile companion app. Most of these designs never left the ideation phase due to time and budgetary constraints, but they were well-received internally and scoped to be part of future enhancements.
After weeks of requirements gathering, stakeholder meetings, and design iterations, we eventually came up with an initial prototype. This design was considered to be a major improvement over anything Delta had ever created for their employees, with many senior leaders viewing it as both exciting from a design standpoint but scary in terms of change management and user adoption. One piece of feedback we received consistently was that the experience felt cluttered, so we knew it was time to edit ourselves.
Development Workflow
Using TFS, SharePoint, and custom HTML, CSS, & JavaScript, I worked with my backend developers to integrate the code into an Azure CDN.
I collaborated with organizational change analysts on my team to conduct quantitative testing with Delta employees. We facilitated unmoderated user testing to evaluate the initial prototype. The findings revealed problems with the page navigation and general issues with the UI. The testing confirmed that we needed to revisit the visual design.
SharePoint lacks certain functionality out of the box, and to ensure Deltanet could be a modern, robust system, I knew I needed to build parts of the core system to allow for deeper customizations. Working together with software engineers, I was able to design and implement unique SharePoint solutions that extended the base platform. As a result, I was able to create a simplified visual interface that was bolder, less cluttered, and customizable. The client loved the new design and it proved to be more effective from subsequent usability testing.
Client Impact
In April 2016, Deltanet launched globally to more than 250,000 internal users. The project gained the attention and support of incoming Delta CEO, Ed Bastian and the Corporate Communications team successfully took full ownership of the intranet, with the ability to easily author and curate content for the company.
In 2017, Deltanet caught the attention of the Nielsen Norman Group as an excellent example of an enterprise intranet built on the O365 platform. Considering O365 was an emerging platformat the time, Deltanet was a great example of a well-designed enterprise solution hosted on O365.