Norfolk Southern Modernization
Creating an employee portal for a connected future
"Norfolk Southern is a 200-year-old company that's long overdue for a digital transformation. We want to move to a digitally engaged community.”
–Sr Leadership
In advance of the employee portal, NS trusted us to do a complete rebrand -modernizing their look, feel and tone of voice to be more attractive to potential employees.
Core elements of the rebrand included:
Tone of voice
Color palette
Modern typography
Guidelines for imagery
Graphic styles
We adapted the new brand guidelines from our “Embrace Your Brand” into a scalable design system in 2019.
The new NS Employee Portal was the first digital product to leverage our re-branding work. One of our first steps in this effort was to adapt these new branding guidelines to an employee-facing style guide and comprehensive design system.
Norfolk Southern had an urgent need to bring their employee portal vision to life with a sudden shift to remote work for all office employees in 2020.
The purpose was to create a central “hub” for accessing everything the NS employee might need – benefits information, career planning, vacation tracking, company events, and more. Available across device types, myNS is the modern company intranet supporting the NS workforce.
"The fact that we even have this portal is a reflection that NS values employee feedback”
— NS Employee
Process
To start, we hosted a two part workshop with key stakeholders to run through several activities to help us define the vision for the employee portal.
Character cards were used to generate a sense of empathy for users. We identifed a variety of user types and had participants identy what their goals were at NS and what motivates them
In addition to character cards we facilitated a madlibs style activity where leadership could start to align on the Employee value proposition. We divided into two team and had participants work together to come up with a value prop that would later be consolidated and refined.
After the workshop, we were able to interview a variety of employees to further refine our direction
As designs were being created, we conducted iterative user testing sessions to seek feedback and refine.
To facilitate the sessions, the team generated testing guides, protocol and standardized templates to highlight results and monitor outcomes.