The Royal Society approached me to redevelop their Intranet for them.
The Royal Society approached me to redevelop their Intranet for them, the key outcomes from the project were to be: to be more in keeping with their public facing website in terms of look and feel be able to feature company / news items ( and keep them at the top ) increase staff engagement with the intranet I met the Royal Society at their (very impressive) building just off the Mall, and talked to them about their requirements and also proposed some ideas myself at a Discovery session at the start of the project.
The Existing intranet (before our work on it)
The existing feel of the intranet was very dated (old basic blog feel ) and text heavy with no way to feature organisation/news articles. It was decided to create a more visually engaging layout, to make the news features stand out.
Homepage of the old intranet
The New Intranet we developed
I developed the functionality to have selected news articles at the top of the page, where they could have an image to help engage users with this content and other news items underneath in a larger format so as to help with engagement also. Having the Top Links on the right in a larger more stand out format, helps users navigate to where they need quickly. My graphic designer mocked up different designs for the new intranet (based on the public facing website’s design) after we’d consulted on the UX elements, and once a design was agreed by the Royal Society, we began building a new WordPress theme based on this design. The new theme was built on the popular bootstrap css framework, so that it would look great on a large number of devices (mobile phones, tablets, desktop computers…).
The new homepage
In brief what we did to improve the user experience:
- Designed in keeping with the public facing website
- Created a featured news section at the top ( where you see the 3 images), with ability for new items to stay in place until admin decides they aren’t relevant
- Created sections to easily allow users to find what they needed (eg top links)
- Made the other news items more prominent by adding nice styling and an image to the left
- Added a news ticker feature to the top of the page, for short but important staff announcements
- Moved the login and search into the header to save space (and appear when needed see later in this doc).
This new theme was carried throughout the new intranet
new search bar in header
new login feature – to save space and appear when needed
Conclusion
The Royal Society were very happy with the new Intranet, which has helped in engaging the staff (its getting much more use), and bringing it inline (look and feel) of the public facing website and making it look great on all devices. The Royal Society and Green Box continue to work together on an ongoing basis on other projects. A testimonial from the Comms manager can be seen on our testimonials page.