About
While I was working as design consultant, I had the opportunity to work on refreshing the design of the internal portal used by CarMax employees. A team including myself, my creative director, a user experience researcher, and a technical lead met with the design and marketing departments at CarMax to determine their vision for the portal. We learned that their portal was very old, built on an archaic technology and was slated to be moved to a newer version of Microsoft SharePoint, which is what our interface would be informed by. Knowing these facts, we set out to make a CarMax-branded intranet that the clients would be proud of.
The Ask
Our team was asked to not only use the framework provided by SharePoint as the basis for our layout, but also to make sure to include any available resources provided by the CarMax design system, ‘LEGOS’, to ensure consistency with the brand. The client also requested to see as much ‘real’ content in our designs as possible, in order to help them visualize where existing resources would live in this new world. With this in mind, we agreed to work closely with our clients to get their approval at each step in the process.
Wireframe views of each page template type (with alternate versions of each) to communicate to the client which options they would have when they manage the portal in the CMS.
The Method
After meeting with the leadership behind the LEGOS design system and the marketing team who was responsible for the upkeep of the CarMax portal, we felt confident in our approach to adjust the information architecture of the navigation. The UX researcher got to work doing analysis via card sorting and presented their findings to our stakeholders via new site map. We agreed on this new navigation structure and implemented it in the form of “mega menus” which you can see examples of. While the researcher was hard at work sorting, I set out to create template pages for each of the major sections of the portal so that they could be reused and repurposed on the CMS side of SharePoint when it came time for the stakeholders to maintain their content. I made sure to use real content provided by our clients to inform the most accurate representation of the designs, but also include place holders to inspire new types of content.
Once we settled on the types of page templates, I set out to create the main landing pages for our new site map. Because SharePoint is a web-based application, we made sure to include examples of each type of web view; Large desktop, standard desktop, tablet, and mobile sizes.
The Result
While we ran into a hard-stop on the project due to technical restraints that could not be resolved, we delivered a whole new portal experience for CarMax complete with new navigation, site map, and search experience. I was pleased with the work I created to visually tie together the requirements of SharePoint, the brand of CarMax, and the needs of the users of the portal. We created a fully-fleshed out site that is more user-friendly, visually appealing, and easier to navigate than it’s predecessor.
Views of the “Mega menu” design as well as the Search functionality