DALLAS-After operating with the same intranet for a decade, American Airlines Credit Union decided it was time to launch a "living, breathing landing page."
The results have helped garner the $5.9-billion CU a Best Practices Award from Credit Union Journal.
Veronica Martinez, project manager, organization performance and employee development, said it was difficult to find content on the old Intranet, plus it had a "shaky" search engine. The result was "much frustration" for end-users.
AACU created a focus group representing every department in the organization to take part in user interviews, surveys and then a card sorting project. Once the data was collected, the portal team designed a prototype to ensure content was well organized prior to usability testing.
"With the support of the Passageways consulting team, we were able to develop a brand new portal with an incredibly organized landing page," Martinez reported. "First and foremost, it was essential that the landing page content reflected the value we place on our employees and their contributions. Not only did it exemplify our culture with impactful imagery and stories, it allowed our employees to find the information they needed to do their jobs quickly."
One goal was to create as much behind-the-scene automation as possible. "Quotes of the day," for instance, could be loaded over a year in advance, while birthdays and anniversaries are pulled from employee profiles, as are photos of employees celebrating milestones. A virtual suggestion box titled "Give us your Good Ideas" allowed individuals to submit recommendations that would be automatically routed to the portal team, with an option for anonymity.
Drop-Down Menus
A strong, single search engine with drop-down categories separating products and services from internal policies and procedures optimizes overall search functionality, Martinez said. An employee directory can be accessed from the search, with contact information auto-populated from Active Directory. For example, pulling up "Loan Officers" would show all employee profiles with that title. Additionally, employee profile fields are customizable, allowing the credit union to input foreign language skills. This has enabled employees to search "Spanish" and all Spanish-speaker profiles would show up.
"No more sending mass e-mail blasts to everyone in the organization," she said.
A horizontal drop-down page menu and another one with Quick Links (most frequently used websites) were constructed to preserve precious real estate, eliminating scrolling down the page. This also helped the credit union to hold true to its "less than three clicks guarantee" to find portal content.
A central resource tabbed section with links to the most important pages is neatly arranged in the center of the page with the headings Communications, Toolbox, Calendars and About Us.
Formal Unveiling
The formal unveiling of the new landing page was propelled with a series of "teasers" giving employees snippets of each section, highlighting features and benefits without ever uncovering the page as a whole. Martinez said this build-up resulted in an "incredible amount" of excitement. On roll-out day, she recalled, the feedback was "absolutely overwhelming."
"I really believe having organized, rich and succinct content that is accessible by our employees has been a benefit," she told Credit Union Journal. "Our content had been very disconnected and we wanted to have things in more of a bullet-point format. We always want efficiency, effectiveness and engagement in our organization and this has helped. The staff can find the tools to help them do their job in a more timely manner, they have ease of access and now we have more collaboration and camaraderie."
Passageways, a West Lafayette, Ind.-based portal solution provider, named the AA CU landing page its 2010 Best Portal Page winner.
