A new intranet design had to be created for a company with approximately 18,000 employees and 4,500 externals.

While the company continuously worked on improving the customer websites and apps in the UX / UI area, the intranet had been neglected for years.

Employees saw the intranet as a necessary evil that caused a lot of frustration. It was used to write hours, arrange holidays, attend workshops and keep up to date with the company news.

It was difficult to find the right information, unknown business-oriented terms were used, there was no access to certain pages because of specific functions and there were different flows between internal and external employees. 

In addition, integrated applications such as Connections had a completely different look & feel that confused users and had to re-explore the interface.  And last but not least, it only worked well on Windows and therefore not for the designers, working on a Mac Book. 

In less than a month, I've tried to solve some of these problems talked to employees and externals about their experiences, to see which things we could improve in this short amount of time.

Visual hierarchy is about organizing information in a way that’s usable, accessible, and logical to the employees. 

The company news to inform the employees the newest insights are more important than other elements on the page. The smallest elements should be the least important.

Symbols were placed on the top right, to inform employees about more work-related things and indicates whether there are traffic jams, the status of public transport or showing the current stock prices, which are fun to have but not necessary. 

By spacing elements out and keeping a lot of white space on the page, this design makes it easier for people to find the content. Alignment creates a better overview about these elements. 

Proximity separates elements from each other and is also the quickest way to associate similar content, like the direct links where you can plan holidays, fill in hours​​​​​​​ registration or booking a meeting room. While it is more visible than the use of links. The interaction with colleagues is separated from the rest.

More meaningful and efficient interactions with intranet will mean more customization and personalization of features for individual employees or teams. 

If users are seeing what they want and need to see on an intranet platform, they are more likely to enjoy using that platform. This could be as simple as showing content to a particular department or team or suggesting relevant internal content based on interests. 

As training and soft skills become more important at the workplace a Learning Management application integrated with intranet will allow people to learn and measure learning skills. 

Social features at intranet are just as important as a good company culture when it comes to employee engagement. Social intranet features like a blog, articles, content share, e-mail, a team portal and video integration are made to encourage more engagement between team members and between individual members outside of the team. The more users engage with the social tools, the more feedback you’ll get on how to improve and optimize the social media interactions and the better your intranet strategy can become.