Intel Circuit

The recently relaunched central news and task hub for Intel employees across the globe. This overview highlights improving and extending existing functionality and the creation of an additional sub-library of more expressive components.

Role
Design & Direction

Output
Global Web Platform

Collaborators
Metalab
Erwin Dumas, Lead Design
Matthew Turrini, PM
Rachel Ulgado, Development

A Revitalized Global Platform

Working with Metalab and beginning in 2017, a long overdue overhaul of the main news and task hub for employees was launched in 2018 that saw an elegant and simplified experience.

The previous version on the left and the newly launched version on the right.

Redesigning something people use everyday, even with thorough testing and good intentions, may cause a great amount of distress.

Objective

Rethinking the rethink: pivoting from a consumption model to an action model.

Considerations

Focusing On Task Completion
Through comments and interviews, we reorientated the platform back to a task-centric one. Making the navigation retractable generated frustration with users accustomed to having one less click to complete an action.

Refining The Navigation Structure
In addition to making the navigation always visible, the structure and behavior of the navigation was greatly enhanced.

Improving Search & Other Refinements
On launch, the search function was not fully implemented (partly due to MVP realities). With Metalab’s learnings and proposals, many small adjustments to search functionality as well as other small UX fixes greatly improved the platform for subsequent releases.

On the left was that hamburger hidden tray-based navigation from the relaunch, the right is the updated always visible navigation.

Always On Navigation

Below is a prototype of the improved navigation. Making the nav visible on load and reducing a click was a vast improvement. People come to Circuit to get things done, with news being secondary.

Giving Authors Richer Options

The initial redesign was successful greatly streamlining and reorganizing content pages. However, the design system was deemed too Spartan for pages requires more storytelling and visual flexibility.

Objective

Enabling Stronger Brand Expression With New Components.

Considerations

Larger And More Prominent
The success of the new design system was to bring order to chaos, however, it frustrated some authors who desired the ability to use photographic assets. We created more visually appealing assets to address this need.

More Flexibility In Design
In addition to more subjective visual appeal, we created components that would accommodate more media types and complexity to future-proof the platform’s publishing options.