NSW Telco Authority, making a useful intranet
Client
NSW Telco Authority is a 400 person organisation within the Department of Customer Service. They deliver critical radio communications to first responders and essential services to keep people and places in NSW safe and connected.
Problem
The Telco SharePoint intranet was only 18 months old but it was receiving negative feedback and low engagement.
Scope
I was engaged full-time for 6 months to undertake a full UX discovery, design and implementation with the aim improve engagement and maintenance burden.
Tasks
Stakeholder and user interviews
Stakeholder engagement
Workshop facilitation
Visual design
SharePoint development
Training documentation
Governance documentation
Process
Discover →
- Kickoff workshops
- Convene working group
- Stakeholder mapping
- Ecosystem mapping
- Technical outreach
- Project plan
- Checkpoint
Research →
- Content audit
- UX audit
- Analytics review
- Stakeholder interviews
- User interviews
- Survey
- Best practice research
- Technical outreach
Analyse & ideate →
- Affinity diagramming / clustering
- Information architecture
- Ideation
- Feature feasibility and prioritisation
- Custom component research
- Checkpoint
- Distribute content requests
Design →
- Wireframing
- Hi-fidelity mockups
- Prototype
- Templates in dev site
- User testing
- Graphic designer collaboration
- Test and iterate
- Test and iterate
- Checkpoint
- Feedback integration
Implement
- Migrate content
- Copywriter collaboration
- Content owner collaboration
- Governance documentation
- Training videos and docs
- Visual style guide
- User testing
- Checkpoint
- Accessibility checks
- Go live
- QA
- Launch
- Content owner drop in sessions
50 stakeholders interviewed over 37 meetings
Before diving into solutions we needed to know assumptions were correct and what people in Telco actually wanted.
I interviewed 50 stakeholders and users in 37 interviews. We wanted to know what they used, how often they used it, how they navigated the site and how they thought it could be more useful in their role and as an employee.
Over the course of the interviews archetypes started to emerge. These weren’t a formal part of the UX documentation but they helped me categorise stakeholders and understand their motivations.
We first needed to understand whether people even wanted an intranet, and what problems or opportunities they saw in it. After speaking with Telco staff about their needs and pain points, we found overall sentiment towards the intranet was positive. Good news.
Archetypes
Key insight – We want organisational clarity
Around 90% of participants wanted greater organisational clarity—from high-level overviews to team capabilities.
Gathering and maintaining accurate team content was a major challenge, so I needed stakeholder buy‑in. I presented these insights to senior leaders, and while feedback was cautious at times, their support allowed me to move forward with a clear plan to build a useful, sustainable site.
Key insight – there is lots on there but it’s hard to find anything
Users reported relying memory instead of intuitive when navigating the site. Add to that SharePoint’s flat page templates limited typical UI patterns like breadcrumbs, active states, or dynamic sub‑navigation.
The new nav had to be structured but flexible enough to accommodate future content.
Insight – inconsistent onboarding
An unexpected pain point I heard over and again related to the other insights. Inconsistent onboarding meant different levels of org knowlege alignment to principles and understanding how to self serve.
I worked closely with the office of the Managing Director to combine multple pdfs into one online onboarding guide. If busy hiring managers could send new starters to the intranet for a solid overview it would help improve the foundations.
Challenge – orgs don’t need another digital asset that’s hard to maintain
Through testing, research and consultation it had became clear that a pragmatic, ‘out of the box’ approach was essential to the project success. This meant abandoning several features we had proposed in the ideation phase.
Finding the intersection between desirability and feasibility would give the site greater longevity.
My design principles were:
- Less pdfs
- Clear visual styles for different types of links – documents, external sites and tools
- Minimal use of graphics and images for illustration purposes
- Consistent template layouts
- Clear documentation
- A content owner or contact listed on each page
Templates, content migration and governance
Working closely with the Internal Comms team and nominated content owners in key teams we rolled out the new intranet.
This culminated in two days when the team and migrated the new styles and content from the mock site to the live site.
Outcome
The refreshed intranet was launched on-time and was well received. Analytics were difficult to measure in the short time but there was a positive perception shift.
The team plans to continually maintain and improve the site.
Anna’s UX insights and digital design skills were invaluable over the last six months, as was her cool, calm, collected and considered approach to simplifying the complex and solving problems.
Dave Morrant, Director Customer
