February 8, 2007
HR unveils new, user-friendly Web site
The UW Human Resources Web site has a new look as of Feb. 5, but the change is not about looks. The goal, say the staffers who created the new site (www.washington.edu/admin/hr), was to help UW employees find useful, easy-to-understand information as quickly as possible.
The kind of information HR has to offer, after all, is essential. As HR Webmaster Bruce Miller says, “If you’re going to apply for a medical leave, or retire, or change your insurance beneficiary, or do almost anything connected with employment or benefits, it’s not like you can go somewhere else to get information about that.”
So Miller and others on the HR team set out to make the site simply the best university human resources site in the country. It’s not that they wouldn’t have wanted an excellent Web site before, but like many University Web sites, HR’s simply grew like Topsy, without a comprehensive design.
“We never had a specific information presentation format,” Miller says. “So different people wrote information at different times without a defined structure for that information.”
The team, which was headed by Kimberly Mishra, HR’s marketing and communications manager, set out to change that after a survey a little over a year ago. Rather than send out a formal questionnaire, HR simply posted some basic questions on its existing Web site:
- Can you generally find what you’re looking for?
- Does it take you less time than you thought, about what you expected, or more time than you thought to find things?
- How easy is it to understand the information you get?
- How happy are you overall with the site?
When the answers came in, HR noted an interesting phenomenon. After the first 35 or 40 responses, the percentages remained consistent. About 70 percent of the people said they could usually find what they were looking for, but two-thirds of those said it took too long and the information they got was hard to understand.
Convinced by the feedback that a change was in order, HR then conducted a “communications audit” — scrutinizing all of its written information.
“We found that a lot of the content — while super thorough — was written from HR’s perspective,” Mishra says. “So if you were an employee and wanted to know about leave, you had to also read through what managers need to know about leave. You might also have to look in several places to find all the information you needed for something you wanted to do.”
At this point a team was formed to create a new Web site. About 10 or 11 people, including Mishra and Miller, worked on it steadily for eight months. Then Mindy Kornberg arrived as the new vice president for human resources and decided the site needed to be completed earlier than the team had anticipated.
“She fast-tracked the project because she saw it as one of the quickest ways that we could improve our service to our clients,” Mishra says.
Kornberg also had some personal experience behind her decision. When she gave a talk to the Professional Staff Organization recently, she mentioned that as a new employee, she’d found the HR Web site frustrating.
The team first looked at about 30 other university HR sites in an attempt to see what worked well and what didn’t. Then they brainstormed how they would restructure the Web site, and they came up with several new approaches:
- They would organize information according to the following roles — new employees, employees, managers, faculty and students — so people could go directly to information relevant to them.
- They would organize information under “life events” to make it easier for people to find everything they needed in one place.
- They would organize each page under three topics — understand, act and explore — to provide a clear and uniform presentation.
All three approaches were adopted in the cause of bringing some order to a mass of information. The HR Web site is made up of thousands of pages — “a couple of good novels worth,” Miller says. The team tried to take the user’s perspective and figure out a way to get people to the information they needed as quickly as possible, and not force them to read irrelevant material. Thus it made sense to create separate pages for people in different roles.
The concept of life events came out of work the Benefits and Work/Life units were already doing. The idea is, if a major life event occurs, such as the birth of a baby, what are all the things an employee might want to do around that event — everything from adding a dependent to health insurance to signing up for child care. Life events pages are found under the “employee” role section.
Organizing the page into understand, act and explore sections is an attempt to create that uniform information presentation format that was missing before. The “understand” category is for information users need. “Act” is for those things they need to do. And “explore” is a place to find referrals for further information if the person is interested.
“In that area we were able to take a step back from whatever we were talking about and see what other things might this person be thinking about — whether they be HR related or not, and kind of draw those dots for them,” Mishra says.
The HR team tested the site — both before and after actual content was inserted — with two kinds of clients — those who had complained in the past and those who hadn’t. Most of that work was done at the user’s own work station.
“The advantage of that was, we got to see how our site looked on a bunch of different computers and how people actually used their own personal work stations,” Miller says. “So it allowed us to discover some things that forced us to change based on how the site looked on different machines.”
The team’s work isn’t finished. They’ve now turned to phase two of the project — pages that involve units outside HR, such as those on workplace violence. And they’re eager to hear feedback from users, which they will use as they continue to improve the site. Comments should be sent to uwhr@u.washington.edu.
