Improving the Usability of A Corporate Intranet

A recent redesign of MITRE's corporate intranet, the MITRE Information Infrastructure (MII), improved the system's usability. The redesign team gathered its requirements from a corporate-wide employee survey, MITRE management, and the project team, and performed a heuristic user interface evaluation of the original system. A major goal of the redesign was to assess whether new web capabilities, such as frames and Java, could improve the usability of the MII. Other goals included updating the look of the system and propogating that look to the subsite level, improving the organization of the information, improving the navigation, increasing the technical content to support information reuse within the company, adding job-oriented navigation aids, and adding a live announcements banner. This paper describes the requirements gathering process, the redesign process, the user evaluations performed throughout the redesign process, and the lessons learned in this redesign of a large-scale web site.