The California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) is the state agency that manages pension and health benefits for more than 1.7 million California public employees, retirees, and their families. With over $300 billion in assets, CalPERS is the largest pension fund in the United States.
The challenge
CalPERS wanted to update both the design and technology supporting “the Insider,” the agency’s intranet/extranet information and collaboration resource. Preliminary research showed what the Leadership team already knew: Both the intranet and employee confidence would need to be rebuilt. The challenge would be to create a site that was intuitive, resource rich AND easier to use than the “phone-a-friend” strategy that employees had all adopted. Furhter, the new design needed to support headquarters and field offices distributed throughout the state. Target success criteria included
- Create a single-point-of-truth, integrating tools, information and communications to facilitate productivity
- Make day-to-day information and tools easy to find and use
- Embedding workflow to improve productivity for frequent and critical tasks
- Promote cloud-based collaboration and communication at the enterprise, group and project level
- Support and encourage distributed, plain-langauge content publishing
The solution
Usability.org teamed with Kiefer Consulting to deliver a Sharepoint solution to serve the diverse needs of the huge CalPERS community.
- Analysis started with a robust content inventory of the existing site – legacy and outdated info was flagged for deletion leaving essential content more easily accessible
- Conducted user-centered research and made recommendations for improvements within the constraints of the Sharepoint platform
- Needs analysis research included cafeteria capture where researchers and users spent time exploring the old site to see how people wanted to use the site
- Task analysis research with users uncovered what worked and what needed to be improved
Members feedback was clear. They wanted the CalPERS website to be easy to use with important information readily accessible online or on the go.
