Background
ConocoPhillips is the largest oil refiner in the United States
and fourth largest globally. It operates in more than
40 countries with over 35,000 employees and assets of
$86 billion.
The Challenge:
merging companies, merging intranets
In 2002, Phillips Petroleum Company and Conoco completed
their merger. The new management team of ConocoPhillips deemed it critical to centralize the two companies'
servers and move towards "self-serve" intranet portals.
This posed numerous front-end usability challenges. Many
existing intranet applications were overly complex and
had inconsistent, unorganized navigation. Such was the
case with its HR Express intranet site: ConocoPhillips
inherited a disparate set of HR-related applications loosely
connected by a single menu.
ConocoPhillips' new HR Express intranet site provides users with
summary views that answer their most frequent questions
HFI's Approach: a user-centered design standard
HFI collaborated on a redesign to create a one-stop HR
portal. The goals were to:
- Create an expandable architecture that could accommodate
new functionality and tools in the future
- Provide one location for employees to view information
and respond to alerts
- Give managers a simple dashboard to monitor their teams
The Outcome: timely completion, immediate ROI
HFI has observed that typical corporate standards
projects last over one year – and the standards rarely
get implemented! By contrast, the standards project at
ConocoPhillips took just three months to complete and
was put to use immediately in the HR Express redesign.
Everyone benefited from the new HR site, which offered:
- Summary screens that answered the majority of people's
questions
- Easy access to all functions
- Simplified data entry/editing
- Related information automatically displayed (based on
users' location on the site)
- Reduced number of secondary browsers opened
ConocoPhillips' HR Express help desk historically received
300 calls per week. Immediately after the redesigned site
launched, help desk calls literally disappeared – zero
calls/week for the first three months running.
Plus, ConocoPhillips enjoyed the ongoing benefits of a
user-centered design standard:
- Developers save time: Instead of revisiting the same
design decisions, developers can simply refer to the
standard; ongoing maintenance and content management
are also simplified.
- Users are more efficient: Because designs are consistent,
users can generalize their knowledge of how one
screen works to all the other screens of the same type.
You could say ConocoPhillips struck the biggest "oil well"
of the digital age: usability! |
