CHS
CHS Source
CHS Source is an intranet for internal communications and employee self-service.
A Fortune 100 agriculture, energy and financial services company, CHS has 11,000 employees in the US, the Middle East, South America, and Central and Eastern Asia.
Outcomes
- Led discovery and strategic roadmap for 11,000-employee global intranet: Conducted interviews, surveys, and heuristic evaluation revealing critical issues: third-party application silos creating unsupportable tech debt, utility content buried under HQ-centric news, and 50% of employees (field workers) finding limited value in current system.
- Identified benefit enrollment as leverage point: Discovered every employee uses intranet for benefits enrollment via third-party app, but half never return throughout the year. Many field employees lacked work computers or computer literacy. Proposed kiosk/tablet-based enrollment portals for non-office locations to serve underserved employee population.
- Shifted stakeholder mindset from content management to product thinking: Introduced UX roadmap methodology and continuous improvement model. Worked one-on-one with sponsor team (content writers serving as product leaders) to build internal capability, enabling them to execute roadmap goals independently without ongoing agency dependency.
- Created pragmatic integration strategy for legacy tech debt: Navigated logistically impossible task of decoupling all third-party applications by targeting specific high-value user flows (town hall video integration, benefits data passing) to create seamless experience within technical constraints.
Research Methodologies
- Sponsor and user Interviews
- Surveys
- Comparative analysis
- Heuristic evaluation (Limited)
- Site traffic analysis
- Nielsen Norman Group Intranet Reports
The Big Takeaways
- Third-party applications had created a confusing user experience, and had made the site unsupportable. "Decoupling" the tech silos will be an immediate priority.
- People wanted 'utility' over 'news' content. Therefore, navigation and page layout needed to be restructured to be more task-focused.
- Every employee uses CHS Source for enrollment in benefits, which is fulfilled by a third-party application. About half of those employees
don't use CHS Source throughout the year. (See Scenarios) What's more, many of them don't have work computers, or don't work in an office environment. Some are even computer illiterate. To address these issues,
we needed to create kiosks or tablet-based benefits portals,
and send to non-office locations for easy and private enrollment.
Other Findings
- 'Search' is mostly useless and distrusted
- Benefits information and HR tasks far outweighed other content
- Most users wanted utility over news
- Limited or no value for employees outside of the US
- Limited or no value for employees in the field (1/2 the employee base)
- High volume of HQ-centric news, which many users found useless or offputting
- Mobile users found resources quickly
- Expert users (typically HR and management) found the intranet useful and visited frequently
