User-Centered Intranet Redesign: Set Up for Success in 11 Steps

Over the past 20 years I have analyzed the process used by hundreds of teams that have created great intranets. I have learned that a successful intranet-redesign project begins well before sketching, feature selection, or coding. In fact, you can make the redesign process effective, smooth, and user-centered by following the steps in this article. Since every organization has its own culture, needs, and challenges, use these steps as a guide and seek out ways to modify them in ways that will work in your setting.

The first phase of a great intranet-redesign process lays the foundation for the new design. This initial phase involves assembling an intranet team, researching user needs and discovering improvement opportunities, settling on a common vision for the redesign project, and securing resources.

Team

1. Appoint a Leader

Appoint a leader for the redesign. While many people can be invested in the intranet, if no one person is in charge it’s easy to think that someone else is getting the job done. An official leader will avoid the diffusion of responsibility.

The leader is responsible for distilling many perspectives from upper management and stakeholders from around the organization, making the most of tools in the digital workplace and keeping the team focused.

The intranet leader will:

• Be responsible for creating the project vision and help the team uphold it
• Unite and motivate team members
• Keep leadership and stakeholders involved and supportive
• Make final decisions when they are needed, in the wake of distractions and politics
• Take a wholistic view of employee roles across the organization, user tasks, business needs, digital tools, and how to make the intranet most effective

News, announcements, events, benefits, policies, and system assistance are often large parts of intranets. So, it makes sense that most intranets are owned and led by corporate communications, IT, HR, or a combination of these. Less commonly, intranets are owned by a Web team or a special intranet or digital-workplace team.

2. Assemble the Intranet Team

Gathering the initial team usually happens in one of three ways:

• The team is already in place from the previous design, and those people are slated to be on the team for the redesign. It’s great to have some headcount secured from the start, and, because the team has worked on an intranet before, it already has some insights about intranet design.
• Someone hires an agency to do most of the design and all or some of the coding. Agencies can bring intranet-design experience plus an outside perspective that invigorates the intranet team and helps it navigate the design process. They are especially great to fill gaps in skills needed only temporarily in the intranet-design process.

80% of the winners in our 10 most recent Intranet Design Annual contests hired outside agencies to work with them on the intranet redesign. The amount of work assigned to each agency varied. In some cases, the agency did little work, for example only one of the following: Agile coaching, ideation, journey-map creation, prototyping, visual design, assisting with IA or search, coding the system. In other cases, the agencies created the intranet from A to Z.

Note that working in Lean or Agile means that teams must plan their partnerships with outside agencies to extend beyond the main intranet release to also include future smaller iterations. In other words, the partnership doesn’t end at the big launch. This type of process may mean that you will need to find additional budget to retain an agency. It also creates opportunities for a long-term partnership with an agency that can truly learn the company’s business. (Or, if a partnership was not a good fit, teams can try out new agencies on less intense, smaller releases.)

• Leaders assemble an internal team to match their needs. With this approach, skills needed for the redesign are identified, then the team is assembled from inside or outside the organization to match the project needs. A benefit to having internal employees work on the intranet is that they will be able to maintain the intranet once released and they will stay invested in the project. But, defining the needed skills can be difficult, especially at the project’s inception.

Gathering the full intranet team can take some time and may not be completed in early stages of the redesign. Gather a small ‘starter team’ with core skills such as IA, search, content strategy, UX strategy, interaction design, service design, programming, user research, workshop facilitation, and promoting and marketing the intranet.

State of Current Affairs

3. Identify the Catalyst for the Intranet Redesign

To help you anticipate where work will be easy or cause friction, first identify the reason for your intranet-redesign project. The more common catalysts I’ve encountered include:

• Mergers and acquisitions
• An organizational transformation, like updated strategic vision or change in offerings
• Rebranding of the organization or of its product and services
• An update/retirement of the tool(s) that the intranet is built on or a new technology that the organization wants to adopt
• User complaints or usability issues
• Leadership’s decision to change the intranet in order to better convey messages or support employees

No matter what the reason for the redesign, all organizations need to complete certain steps for the redesign to be helpful and successful. The catalyst for the redesign can make the steps in the process harder or easier.

4. Review, Plan, and Do User Research

Review user-research findings, plan new research, and conduct new research. Also, choose the metrics you’ll use to track improvements and decide on how to collect the needed information.

Review existing research findings. Research should inform the goals of the new design (not come after the design is created — or never). Look at findings early in the planning process.

Whether you have rich user research or minimal feedback, begin by reviewing what you already know about the usefulness, effectiveness, efficiency, and usability of your existing intranet and how it works with other internal systems. Analyze the user feedback already gathered and see where research gaps exist. Then carry out that needed research.

Some of the information that is useful early in the intranet-planning phases includes:

• Job roles at the organization and their relationships to the core business
• Tasks associated with those roles, as they relate to the organization’s objectives (as in service design)
• How those tasks are done today (with the current systems)
• How well the current systems serve employees and the organization
• Why the systems work well or not
• Where opportunities lie for the intranet to support better employee productivity, communication, and motivation

Some research methods that can be impactful early in the intranet project include:

a. contextual inquiries with employees
b. interviews with users
c. task analysis for particular admin tasks and job functions
d. qualitative user tests of the current systems
e. analysis of feedback received via the intranet and identification of topics that frequently require assistance
f. site analytics, for investigative purposes

Measure your current intranet so you can later compare it to the redesign and assess the improvements.

To benchmark the effectiveness and ease of use of the current intranet(s) and digital workplace systems, consider using these methods:

a. quantitative user tests on top tasks
b. survey feedback from users quantifying what works well, what doesn’t, and what they want
c. site analytics, for issue-identification purposes
d. support calls (number of calls and topics that people need help with)
e. online help requests (how many and about which topics)

5. Map Out the Organization’s Digital Ecosystem

Begin the redesign process by first figuring out what you have now and which tools your employees are using. Start with an inventory of internal systems, such as the number of intranets and extranets that exist, which other tools people are using effectively or ineffectively, which devices people are using (and which they might use in the future).

This inventory will help the intranet team understand the opportunities for the new intranet and also which tools to keep, change, merge, or replace in the redesign.

Vision and Alignment

6. Involve Stakeholders

In any design project it’s important to involve and engage stakeholders, who could be your internal development team, leadership, or clients who have hired you. The main purposes for including intranet stakeholders early in the design process are to align on a vision and goals and gain agreement and support in resource allocation and project timing.

To identify the intranet’s stakeholders, think of a stakeholder as anyone who, by contributing and supporting the project, could greatly influence its success or, alternatively, could significantly hurt it if not involved in it.

Consider a few different types of stakeholders who might be involved in an intranet’s redesign, all with different goals and influence:

• High-power people who influence many decisions related to time, money (budget), resources, and tools needed for the intranet
• Representatives responsible for a user group (e.g., a team or role they manage or support)
• Owners with responsibility for a section, feature, or content on the intranet
• Individual users who are responsible for their own corporate wellbeing and job

Ensure that stakeholders feel heard. Listen to stakeholders and learn about their needs and of those whom they represent. But, do not interpret everything the stakeholders state about their constituents as fact, as most are a step removed from the users. Like a senator represents the citizens of a state, stakeholders represent their group and have a vested interest in responding to its needs. But they won’t always have an accurate picture of those needs. To offset this possible issue, always complement stakeholders’ assertions about users with your own direct research.

7. Align with Stakeholders on the Intranet Vision

The intranet should help employees meet organizational goals. Getting leaders to state the goals and agree upon the intranet vision will help the team prioritize work. It will also influence which resources leadership will commit to the intranet. To align stakeholders, learn about the business from the organization’s leadership and talk to leaders and other stakeholders around the organization about the vision.

Once the vision is decided upon, look for opportunities to socialize the idea of a new intranet across the organization early on. Since people are change averse, get them used to the idea of a redesign. This approach can build excitement, helps stakeholders to sell the result to their teams, and makes it easier to recruit employees to participate in user research. Some ideas for advertising across the organization include:

• a kit that stakeholders can use to communicate the design goals to their teams
• a video of what is planned for the new design
• a contest for collecting ideas for possible names for the intranet
• an “own the page” marathon during which people claim content on the intranet, to help with the initial content auditing

Setting Up Resources

8. Allocate Resources

Just after you have discussed the intranet vision and stakeholders’ goals for the intranet, it is time to get resources. This is the point where those in charge of limited resources need to agree upon what they will allocate to make that vision happen. The big resources to look at often include the time, people, and technology.

If previously you assembled only the intranet starter team, put the full team together now.

In some cases, the budget, tools, and people resources are allocated before the intranet vision is created. If that’s the case, take those resources into account as you create a vision, so it can be realistic given the landscape.

9. Create User-Centered Artifacts for the Intranet Team to Use Regularly

Many Intranet team members often work only part time on the intranet. Information that allows these people to quickly reestablish context, like user stories or an Agile backlog, can be incredibly helpful to those who are involved in multiple projects.

These user-centered artifacts can:

• keep the intranet team focused on the right user needs
• help it make informed design tradeoffs
• lead them in prioritizing work appropriately, by focusing on users

Some commonly used user-centered artifacts are:

a. Current-state and future-state journey maps
b. Personas
c. Top tasks
d. Current-state and future-state service blueprints
e. Jobs-to-be-done

To encourage use, include the team in their creation, print and post them in team spaces — both physical and online, refer to them and encourage others to do the same, and use them as a guide in design reviews.

10. Do System- and Operations-Related Planning

There’s much to do related to project planning. Top areas to decide on at this phase are:

• Technology and tools. Consider in-house skills, command over languages, maintenance, updates, legacy systems that need to be supported or should be replaced, and vendor contracts.
• A development process. What’s used in house (Agile, Lean UX, or Waterfall)? Which skills and systems do you have or need in order to support this process? Which tools might you use for communication and tracking the team’s plans, work, and progress? How will you schedule and plan to include user research and iterative design (user testing and changing the design to respond to findings) throughout the design process?

Plan for a design system, which often includes brand guidelines, content guidelines, UI guidelines, a UI-pattern library, and code for each UI pattern. The benefit of having an intranet design system are many — from making the intranet team’s job faster and easier to promoting better designs and encouraging consistency across the digital workplace.

11. Look for Opportunities to Advertise Early

Since people are change averse, it’s important to get them used to the idea of a new intranet. This approach can build excitement, helps stakeholders to sell the result to their teams, and makes it easier to recruit employees to participate in user research.

Once the vision is decided upon, advertise it across the organization. Some ideas include:

• a kit that stakeholders can use to communicate the design goals to their teams
• a video of what is planned for the new design
• a contest for collecting ideas for possible names for the intranet
• an “own the page” marathon during which people claim content on the intranet, to help with the initial content auditing

Conclusion

This article discusses early work related to a user-centered intranet-redesign project, before your team begins content planning, sketching, moving pixels, or writing code. Subsequent phases cover activities like:

• design and research
• launch, promote, and train
• measure, maintain, and improve

Before any of these activities can happen, there’s a lot of outreach, communication, and diplomacy that need to take place in order for the redesign to be successful and impactful. The project requires the help, input, and support of many, but usually one leader moves the process forward.

Intranet teams and leaders: try not to feel overwhelmed as you embark on your redesign. Use this guide to help you choose where to begin and make progress. Know that planning steps like the ones described in this article have been used many times before to create great intranets, and you can do it too.