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 broken down. Staff had built workarounds because the navigation and site structure didn't reflect reality. 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.
Key Findings
01
Content creators had no naming conventions or shared guidelines. In practice, nobody was following any shared content strategy. The result was inconsistent naming across the intranet that made search and browsing unreliable for everyone.
02
Staff were building their own menu pages to compensate for the lack of well-structured main navigation 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 The consequence showed up most visibly in search results, which surfaced outdated documents alongside current ones with no way to distinguish them.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. The system relied heavily on recall
Impact & Outcomes
↑
Standardized and automated naming processes — removing the burden from staff and enforcing consistency without requiring them to remember rules
↑
New unified main navigation launch, replacing the ad hoc shadow guides and menu pages that staff had built as workarounds
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Search rehabilitated — a new search results page with improved filtering, content tags, and metadata was implemented alongside content cleanup and governance policies around document filing and retirement
What I Learned
I learned a lot about the importance of governance and standardization in managing large-scale digital assets. Governance is not the most exciting thing in the world, but its critical for informational websites, particularly when there are many content publishers.
Another thing that I learned a lot about was designing structured content in order to improve discoverability and usability.
Last, I was able to apply my knowledge of search and browsing from my grad school work. It was really fun to see different types of information seeking in action and strategize ways to support them.
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