Company intranets can become neglected with poorly designed, overly complex interfaces that make it hard for employees to engage or find relevant content. By building from the ground up, we were able to create an intranet focused on internal communications. Allowing our colleagues to find out the latest staff news, website posts, and social media, along with important documents and how tos.

Quick access to regular tasks

While a lot of the functionality was no longer required, the new intranet would still be needed for Purchasing and Office Resources requests, as well as booking meeting rooms. It took a number of design iterations before I decided upon adding links to these forms in a black bar at the top of the page. This bar, persistent across all pages, gave super quick access to the commonly used tasks, while allowing the main content to shine.

A focus on internal communications

A big focus of the new intranet was bringing the latest internal news all round the organsisation. By using WordPress, the Comms team would be able to publish with the same tools they used for the main swimming.org website. Staff would be able to easily catch up on the news at a time that suited them, with the weekly newsletter being simplified with links to the intranet.

Documents that you can find

The new site gave us a perfect opportunity to go over the documents, reorganise them and make sure they were still relevant. There was also scope to add how-to videos for things like basic IT skills. Quick links into this section were added inside a callout banner on the homepage, along with an illustration by our design intern.

All the latest ASA news and social media posts

To round off the homepage we wanted to showcase the latest news from around the swimming.org microsites. The top story from each site was displayed on a card, with the card color taken from the sites theme. The latest Tweets are displayed right on the homepage, allowing even those without social media access to keep up to date.