The Junction

The Royal College of Dental Surgeons of Ontario (RCDSO) is the governing body for dentists in Ontario, Canada. As a rapidly growing organization, the College faces the challenges of keeping employees connected with each another and providing them with easier access to job knowledge and resources.

Working together with the client and their partner brand agency, we created The Junction, an employee portal that staff comes to every day to stay connected and be equipped to get work done.

My contributions

I was responsible for conducting stakeholder and user interviews, designing the mockups, preparing and running the usability testing, and working with the development team on the solution development. Along the way we had reviews and regular check-ins with the client, and they contributed to developing a great working relationship.

Getting to know the College

We conducted interviews with stakeholders and employees to better understand how each department functioned and what it is like working at the College. After consolidating our findings into insights, the team created a success framework to show how each proposed feature would tie back to the business objectives. The framework allowed the clients and our team to see where it made sense to spend more time and effort. We also leveraged this to setup the foundational analytics.

Welcome to The Junction

The Junction was created to strengthen employee engagement, increase productivity, and foster a vibrant culture at RCDSO. The social features such as kudos, photos, and buy and sell have been great at creating conversations. The College and industry news, Knowledge Library, Employee Essentials, and How Do Is' provide important work knowledge and resources to support the users on the job.

Usability testing

We conducted usability testing with employees in different departments and of different tenure. Overall the information architecture, and the layout and visual design resonated well with them. They appreciated that all the disparate content were organized logically in one place.

Some participants felt that the social aspects of the portal were overshadowing the work part. Unfortunately at the time of testing we just started the content audit so the participants only saw the early versions of the knowledge pages.

Outcomes

The Junction has grown organically into a vibrant community with active participation from the employees. The Communication department has been doing a stella job in managing the portal and producing engaging and useful content. The feedback and analytics allowed us to see how the employees are using the solution and where we can improve.