Using Research to Align a Global Organization Across 13 Countries
A global vehicle manufacturer had spent decades growing through acquisitions. By the time they needed a unified digital workplace, 400K employees across 13 countries were operating on completely different systems, and the VP stakeholders responsible for fixing it each had a different vision for what the solution should look like.
Northern Ground brought me in to lead UX strategy for the intranet. The technical problem was substantial: accessibility, internationalization, localization, and cross-brand consistency across multiple acquired companies. The harder problem was organizational. Getting conflicting regional priorities to converge on a single product direction required a research approach rigorous enough to override individual opinion.
Key challenges
Aligning international VP stakeholders with conflicting regional priorities
Building consensus through rigorous research and multilingual validation
Ensuring accessibility and consistency across 13 countries and multiple brands
Problem
The organization knew they needed a unified intranet, but they couldn't agree on what it should be.
Role
UX Director, Northern Ground
Impact
Doubled IA task success rate through multilingual tree testing across 1,438 participants
Unified 400K employees across 13 countries under a single product direction
Research-driven navigation decision became the template for cross-regional digital initiatives
Setting the Stage
The project started with a three-day in-person kickoff workshop. Twenty-five participants flew in from China, Italy, and Brazil. In a room full of people who had never worked toward a shared product, the first task was building a common understanding of what we were even solving.
I ran activities across the three days: current state analysis, future state visioning, stakeholder mapping, early sketching, and a card sort to start pressure-testing navigation ideas. The goal wasn't to finish anything. It was to get everyone in the same conversation before they split back into their regions and time zones.
I reviewed the existing portal analytics and conducted a heuristic evaluation to identify the biggest usability failures across current systems. User interviews across multiple regions surfaced what employees needed from a unified platform. Surveys extended that reach to employees we couldn't interview directly. Those inputs fed into a research plan that would carry us through to beta testing.
Dream state activity, three-day international kickoff workshop.
Research as a Design-Making Tool
Navigation was the core political problem. Every region had a different opinion about how the intranet should be organized, and those opinions came with organizational weight behind them. I needed an approach rigorous enough to resolve the disagreement without anyone feeling overruled.
I ran card sorts to generate candidate navigation structures and used affinity diagramming to find patterns across regional input. Then I built a multivariate multilingual tree test across nine variations in three languages, testing with 1,438 participants. The results weren't close.
Usability testing followed the navigation work, run in English, Italian, and Portuguese across seven countries and five time zones. Remote and unmoderated testing let us reach participants we couldn't have reached otherwise. Those results validated the direction before the project moved into full visual design.
Task success rates across 9 navigation tasks, 3 architecture variants, and 2 languages.
The Turning Point
Going into the navigation presentation, stakeholders weren't cautious or quiet. They had been fighting over the navigation structure for months, each region convinced their approach was right, and each with enough organizational weight to stall the project indefinitely.
I walked the room through the findings, with the qualitative context behind each decision. The shouting stopped. The conversation shifted from what people thought to what the data showed. We left with a final implementation plan everyone could commit to.
"Ashley just put on a masterclass for how to sell research-based UX. She walked them through decks and insights, and helped sell a very squirrely client on proposed navigation. Ashley you should be proud of the deep, thoughtful background on every recommendation you've made."
— Partner/Founder Northern Ground
Recommended portal navigation, distilled from 1,438 participants across 3 languages and 9 variants.
The Outcome
The portal launched to 400K employees across 13 countries. Doubling the IA task success rate in testing meant the navigation held up in the real world regardless of language or region.
The approach became the template for how the organization ran cross-regional digital initiatives. It proved that rigorous research could do what stakeholder meetings couldn't.