One of our award-winning intranets in the 2020 Intranet Design Annual came from Wellcome Trust, a non-profit organization based in the U.K. Wellcome Trust exists to improve health by helping great ideas to thrive. The nonprofit supports researchers, takes on big health challenges, and campaigns for better science by fostering public engagement with science and health research.

Wellcome Trust’s intranet, Trustnet, won an award for its pleasing visual design and its commitment to solving user needs by making tasks simple and efficient. This is what users have to say:

"I'm still relatively new and have to say that Trustnet is fantastic, like nothing else I've ever used! I appreciate how content is always being kept fresh and how easy & quick it is to find info."

"It's always a pleasure seeing what's released in each version, the pace of innovation is refreshing"

"I loooooove Trustnet. It's really easy to use. And pretty."

It’s not often that employees describe intranets as pretty or easy to use, but Wellcome Trust have proved it’s possible to provide pleasing employee experiences. So how did it do it?

The homepage of Wellcome Trust's intranet, Trusnet.
Trustnet’s simple but attractive design was the product of a user-centered design process. The intranet home page features the latest news, events, and a noticeboard for casual employee interactions. (Some images and text have been replaced for confidentiality reasons.)

An Empowered Multidisciplinary Team

Trustnet was built and is managed by a small, multidisciplinary product team. The team comprises a product manager, an editor, a UX designer, a UI designer, a front-end developer, and a back-end developer, and is based within Wellcome Trust’s digital department. While the Trustnet product team is responsible for working closely with internal communications — and is accountable to departments such as HR, IT, finance, and facilities — the team has full ownership of the product and is autonomous in defining its priorities.

With the necessary design and development capabilities in house, the team decided to build Trustnet from scratch, rather than procuring and customizing an out-of-box solution. This approach motivated the team to start with user and organizational needs.

The Trustnet design team raising a glass and smiling to celebrate their award.
Some members of the Wellcome Trust team that were responsible for the winning design, shown here celebrating the 2020 Intranet Design Annual award.

The team utilized Agile methodologies, which ensure that functionality is released incrementally and provides value to users as soon as possible.

Excellent Design Requires a User-Centered Design Process

What made this design possible was the team’s commitment to user-centered design. The team’s high UX maturity ensured that solutions were grounded in knowledge of organizational and user problems and in iterative design and user testing.

How User-Centered Design Is Done at Wellcome

The design process begins with discovery. In this phase, the team spends time identifying and framing the problem to be solved, before carrying out user research on the problem space. Discovery research is complemented with competitive analysis to understand how other products have handled similar problems.

As an example, when the team designed the event features, they started by asking what the larger problem at hand was. For example, what are the issues different users might have with events? What do users need in order to run or attend events? To answer these questions, the team conducted interviews and contextual inquiries with a broad range of users. In addition, the team looked at event-booking experiences across different B2C products to explore innovative features and usable components and get inspiration. (This is a great example that competitive usability evaluation shouldn’t just look at your actual competitors — it often pays off to evaluate designs that solve similar problems, even if they’re in a different industry.)

After performing this discovery work, the team analyzed and distilled its learnings and agreed on the specific areas where a new design could have the most impact.

A wall with lots of sticky notes and mockups.
A research board which condensed insights from user research with competitive analysis findings.

To help frame ideation, the team composed problem statements, which concisely defined the problem to be solved and the corresponding success metrics. Success metrics were defined by asking ‘What would success look like if this issue was solved?’

These problem statements provided a focus for ideation. The team began by sketching solution ideas; next, these solutions were explored with users to gather early feedback. Further wireframing and prototyping helped the team to bring form to these ideas and were used in usability test sessions to collect behavioral data on whether the solutions would work and to inform necessary design updates.

One result of this user-centered design approach was a simple event-booking process for hosts. The team observed that event organizers often had to do many activities, such as book rooms, organize catering, obtain visitor badges, AV equipment, and stationery. Each of these activities involved different forms and processes, making event hosting difficult and time-consuming. The team consolidated these various tasks into a newly designed meeting-room–booking tool (pictured below), which enabled event organizers to do most of their organizational tasks in one place and removed the need to fill in multiple forms and email or call disparate groups.

A screenshot of the meeting room finder tool on Trustnet. Rooms available are shown in cards with photographs of each meeting room accompany descriptions of each room. Users can search and filter the rooms.
The meeting room finder is an intuitive tool that allows users to find available rooms and quickly assess their suitability. The card layout presents a lot of valuable information in one space, without looking cluttered. The option to browse or give an exact time and date caters to both types of user behavior, and photographs of each meeting room helps users assess whether the room will be suitable for their meeting.
A meeting room form with extra sections for equipment, visitors, and catering that can be toggled on and completed.
Trustnet allows users to book a room, along with catering and equipment, and arrange for visitor badges, all in one well-designed form. Integrations with internal systems make this possible.
A meeting room form with extra sections for equipment, visitors, and catering that can be toggled on and completed.
Trustnet allows users to book a room, along with catering and equipment, and arrange for visitor badges, all in one well-designed form. Integrations with internal systems make this possible.

This is just one example of Trustnet’s notable design. Other noteworthy features from Wellcome Trust’s intranet, which are outlined in detail in our 2020 Intranet Design annual, include:

  • Powerful search with intuitive autosuggestions and a small set of useful filters
  • Mobile responsive design
  • Group pages and spaces for employees to engage on matters of interest related to work
  • Community noticeboard where employees can buy and sell belongings or share personal updates
  • Simple-to-use event calendar, integrated with Outlook so that when users sign up for events,  they appear in their work calendar
  • Gym-booking feature so that employees can book gym appointments directly via the intranet
  • Automatically updated people profiles, through integration with the HR system, which provides the data for org charts and personal profiles
  • Forms integrated with internal systems to improve and automate workflows and processes
  • Integration with building-elevator screens displaying event information and location-relevant announcements (This is an example of omnichannel design, where company-to-employee interactions are designed beyond the website itself.)

Summary

As Wellcome Trust shows, designing an intranet that users want to use is possible; it just takes a commitment to prioritize the employee experience and a multidisciplinary team committed to user-centered design. To explore the full case study and learn even more about how the team developed Trustnet, as well as review the full library of screenshots depicting its winning-design details, see our 2020 Intranet Design Annual.

For even more impressive intranets and stories of the supporting work behind them, explore our 2021 Intranet Design Annual, also available now for purchase.