back to home

next case study

City Harvest

A SharePoint portal serving 200+ employees daily

Timeline

3 months (Jun – Aug 2025)

Role

Product Designer

Outcome

Redesigned portal for immediate usage, hi-fi prototype and detailed research deck.

Overview

research

solution IA explorations

Final designs

Overview

About City Harvest

City Harvest is one of the largest New York nonprofit organization, rescuing and delivering food for New Yorkers experiencing food insecurity.

why a redesign?

Fragmented communications & resource sharing pipeline

A silent struggle

In 2021, City Harvest published its organization-wide SharePoint intranet with the hope that resource sharing would be centralized. However, the original design does not support this well.

…so I came up with projects goals

A silent struggle

Improve navigation

Refine navigation so employees can locate essential information regardless of portal familiarity.

Streamline communication

Improve internal content management experience to reduce inaccurate information.

Increase adoption

Improve content and layout design to increase engagement and confidence in portal exploration.

initial problem discovery

How might I reorganize information on the portal to increase communication efficiency for Harvesters?

How might I reorganize information on the portal to increase communication efficiency for Harvesters?

solution highlights

Stakeholder interviews & portal audit

Gauging company culture and working habits

My main research goal was to understand what common experiences did employees have across the organization so maximize the impact of the design recommendations.

From this research, I mapped out the system that is being used under City Harvest:

Stakeholder and IOT maps the internal system

I narrowed my research down to these 3 key insights that guided my ideation:

#1 Inconsistent information architecture frustrates employees for non-regular tasks.

Sending large files and stems of a single fix is tedious and time-consuming, especially when most of the time the receiver has to realign the new files with their local version manually.

#2 Lack of support for musical discussion

Ideating is a very vocal process, so having a way to call and make conversation in real time will boost collaboration.

”

“

Musicians often use onomatopoeia such as “ooh” and “tsk” to convey musical ideas to each other. There are no direct support for this form of communication digitally.

#3 No true mastery of the tool

After all these years, I still don't know what I'm doing.

”

“

Sound engineering is a hard discipline on its own, but often times these engineers still need to adapt to DAWs custom plugins and troubleshooting system on the side. DAWs are hard to learn for both professionals and beginners, even if they already spend 10,000 hours on it.

#2 Employees feel disoriented due to lack of standardized departmental pages.

Desk research shows redundancies from default SharePoint template and inconsistencies in layout across different department pages.

#3 Outdated and inaccurate documents across the portal lead to employees completing tasks incorrectly.

33% of the user interviewees noticed outdated documents as they were showing us the Sharepoint.

I turned them into opportunities that can guide my design process:
  • rethink information architecture to better accommodate seeking unknown-items?
  • adapt a standardized template for different department needs?
  • use design to help cleaning up the portal efficiently?

How might I…

solution IA explorations

Regrouping different types of document

The portal has little intentional organization or information hierarchy. After testing with harvesters, I came up with categories such as "Personal Access" or "Forms & Services" emerged as guidance for better skimming experience.

View The Org Chart

Policies and procedures

Deib resources

Reporting Showcase

Main website

Chart of accounts

IT & BI File Share

your One-Drive

IT & BI File Share

your One-Drive

IT & BI File Share

your One-Drive

your One-Drive

your One-Drive

your One-Drive

your One-Drive

your One-Drive

Quick links

View The Org Chart

Key resources

Policies and procedures

Deib resources

Reporting Showcase

Main website

Chart of accounts

Personal access

IT & BI File Share

your One-Drive

Forms & Services

IT & BI File Share

your One-Drive

Primary screen space reconsideration

I found out that Harvesters access information divergently instead of convergently, meaning that they search for documents directly instead of finding them through departments, so having departments as a dropdown would save more primary screen space for direct access to key resources.

Departments

City harvest

Town Hall

Harvester Vocabulary

City harvest

Departments

Town Hall

Harvester Vocabulary

Final designs

Gentle onboarding with introduction to the concepts of soundscape and constant haptics

Scoping the soundscape with proper location permission

AR mode to live review the sounds with context

Let's chat over a caffeinated drink of your choice ☕️

Let's chat over a caffeinated drink of your choice ☕️

hanguyendo01@gmail.com

hanguyendo01@gmail.com

resume

resume

linkedin

linkedin

@2025 Ha do

@2025 Ha do