Overview
The North Carolina Judicial Branch was upgrading its intranet from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. The goal wasn't a redesign. It was a chance to surface and fix friction that had built up over years of ungoverned growth.
What we found was a system that had quietly broken down. Staff had built elaborate workarounds because the directory structure didn't reflect how they worked. Content was never archived. Search returned noise. The intranet had become something people tolerated rather than used — an organization that had outgrown its own information architecture without anyone noticing.
This work is part of a broader engagement with the North Carolina Judicial Branch, where we also redesigned the public-facing court website.
My Role
Contextual Inquiry
User Interviews
Information Architecture
Governance Strategy
Search Optimization
Research Approach
Having a live system was an advantage. We could observe people in the actual environment rather than asking them to imagine it. Contextual inquiries with key user groups showed us not just what people did, but why — and the gap between those two things was where all the problems lived.
The workarounds staff had built weren't laziness. They were rational responses to a system that didn't support how work actually happened. Naming conventions were too complex to follow consistently. The directory didn't map to how teams organized their work. Search surfaced old content because nothing was ever retired. Understanding the why made the recommendations land, not just sit on a shelf.
Key Findings
01
Naming conventions were too complex to follow consistently. The system required staff to follow elaborate naming patterns for certain content types. In practice, nobody could remember them. The result was inconsistent naming across the intranet that made search and browsing unreliable for everyone.
02
Staff were building shadow directories to compensate for a broken one. In the absence of a centralized, reliable directory, teams had created their own ad hoc document directories. It was a rational workaround — but it fragmented information across the intranet and made the official directory even less trustworthy over time.
03
Nothing was ever archived or deleted. Old content accumulated indefinitely with no governance around retirement. This wasn't negligence — there was simply no process or prompt for it. The consequence showed up most visibly in search results, which surfaced outdated documents alongside current ones with no way to distinguish them.
04
Search had become useless. The combination of inconsistent naming and unarchived old content meant search results were unreliable. Staff had largely stopped using search and were navigating by memory or asking colleagues instead — a significant efficiency loss at scale.
Impact & Outcomes
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Automated complex naming processes — removing the burden from staff and enforcing consistency without requiring them to remember rules
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New centralized directory tool launched, replacing the ad hoc shadow directories staff had built as workarounds
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Search rehabilitated — new search tool implemented alongside content cleanup and governance policies around document filing and retirement
