City harvest – 2025
CITY HARVEST PORTAL
City Harvest is a NYC-based nonprofit that rescues and distributes food to New Yorkers experiencing food insecurity. In 2023, City Harvest migrated all its internal tools and resources across 7 departments to a modern organization-wide SharePoint intranet—the City Harvest Portal.
PROBLEM
How might we help Harvesters eliminate frustration in navigating help Harvesters efficiently communicate across departments, find unknown items, and adopt the Portal more into their workflow?
WHAT I DID
I spearheaded 3 projects that contribute to IT & BI's larger project of revamping and reorganizing internal communication in 6 weeks.
I designed, coded and ran 2 usability tests in order to launch the new SharePoint portal by the end of my internship. Given the short duration, the solution was more about setting design foundation for scale rather than a set-in-stone solution. I launched the redesign at the end of my internship.
HOME PAGE
SCANNABLE, FUNCTIONAL, AND DELIGHTFUL
City Harvest workplace is a very warm and welcoming community, but the portal does not reflect this. My biggest project was to improve navigation and engagement by restructuring information architecture, adding motion and colors, and employing languages that are more human and City Harvest-like.
Accessing shared resources proves the biggest challenge for Harvesters when they want to search for unknown items. The most straightforward fix was to improve SharePoint search engine. This was out of scope for us, so came up with the following design strategies to assist with searching for resources on the home page itself:
DESIGN STRATEGY #1
DIVERGENT SEARCH
Originally, the home page includes links to 7 departments that store the resources. I reversed engineer to put the needed resources upfront, reducing to only one click to them based on most commonly accessed data.
How did I get here?
6 user interviews
12 stakeholder email responses
DESIGN STRATEGY #2
REGROUPED RESOURCES
Accessing shared resources proves a challenge for Harvesters who wants to search for unknown items. The most straightforward fix was to improve SharePoint search engine which was out of scope for us. Instead, I reversed engineer and regrouped information based on most commonly accessed documents instead of having the department folders as the first access.
How did I get here?
12 hours portal auditing
30 survey responses from all staff
An iteration I made after 2nd round of testing.
Before and after my redesign.
OUTDATED FILES
INCORRECT FILE POINT-OF-CONTACT
When an employee stops working at City Harvest, there is no official organization rule to hand off the resources they own. 75%
An iteration I made after 2nd round of testing.
SO I CAME UP WITH A SYSTEM TO REPORT OUTDATED FILE
Any employee can report a file as outdated to the department email or the owner from "Created By" column to report a file as outdated. This distributes the work flow and includes everyone in the process.
What did staff say?
"So cool! I can just do this all day it's like productive therapy."
DEPARTMENT TEMPLATE
…A PIVOT AFTER FAILED ATTEMPT
As cool and high tech as the workflow was, I realized implementing this will take certain amount of custom developer library and thus, I will not be able complete and test out the workflow during the time frame of my internship.
Within my last week, I pivoted to attempt to standardize how different department display their resources to further help Harvesters with navigation on the portal. I used the same components I came up with for home page for ease of future scale.
Example departmental template for the IT & BI team.
Table of components after auditing 7 departmental pages.
RETROSPECTIVE
Always dig deeper —at times when I was stuck between deciding to move forward with the design or pivot due to technical constraint, talking to my coworker and learning more about the org's context helped spark ideas.
Take initiatives as an intern — especially for an organization that is new to UX like City Harvest, advocating for good practices and making sure everyone was on the same page was important.
Co-designing was my best friend — my colleagues were always willing to help and always have an insight that was so pivotal for my redesign, so I tried to include them in my process as much as possible!
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