NSW Telco Authority – making a useful intranet
Eighteen months old and already unloved
NSW Telco Authority delivers critical radio communications to first responders and essential services across NSW. With 400 staff, a well-functioning intranet should be a core operational tool. Instead the SharePoint site was getting negative feedback and low engagement despite being relatively new.
I was brought in full-time for six months to run a full UX discovery, redesign and implementation with two goals: improve engagement and reduce the maintenance burden on the team.
Deliverables
Stakeholder and user interviews
Stakeholder engagement
Workshop facilitation
Visual design
SharePoint development
Training documentation
Governance documentation
Process
Five phases across six months
Each phase had a checkpoint before moving forward which helped to build trust with stakeholders.
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
Process
50 stakeholders interviewed over 37 meetings
The first question was whether staff even valued the intranet as a tool. Overall sentiment was positive, which gave the project solid footing. The harder question was why it wasn’t working.
Around 90% of participants wanted greater organisational clarity: who does what, which team handles what and how to find them. Gathering and maintaining that content would require genuine stakeholder buy-in, not just good design.
I presented the findings to senior leaders. Feedback was cautious in places but their support allowed the project to move forward with a clear mandate.
We want organisational clarity
Introduce dedicated team pages to introduce work and people.
Information is hard to find
Refine navigation to make content easier to locate.
New starters need better onboarding
Integrate intranet resources with onboarding to support early engagement.
Some content performs well
Keep and build on what’s working.
The intranet
lacks a clear role
Define its purpose and value across the organisation.
Search is hard to use
Introduce additional ways to search and filter documents.
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 had learned where things lived rather than being able to find them intuitively. SharePoint’s flat page templates compounded the problem: no breadcrumbs, no active states and no dynamic sub-navigation meant standard wayfinding patterns weren’t available out of the box.
The new navigation needed to be structured enough to handle a complex organisation while flexible enough to grow without breaking.
Key insight
Inconsistent onboarding lead to disengagement
Inconsistent onboarding kept surfacing as a pain point connected to the other findings. New starters arrived with varying levels of organisational knowledge and no single reliable source to get up to speed from.
Working closely with the office of the Managing Director, I helped consolidate multiple PDFs into a single online onboarding guide. If hiring managers could point new starters to one place and trust they’d get a solid overview, it would lift the baseline for everyone.
Design principle
Build for longevity, not just launch
Testing and research made one thing clear: a pragmatic out-of-the-box approach would outlast an ambitious custom one. Organisations don’t need another digital asset that’s hard to maintain. Several features from the ideation phase were cut. The intersection of desirable and feasible was the only place worth building.
- Less PDFs.
- Consistent templates.
- Clear link types for documents, tools and external sites.
- A named content owner on every page.
- Simple enough for any team to maintain without design support.
On time and well recieved
The refreshed intranet launched on schedule. Analytics were limited in the short window after launch but the perception shift was clear and positive. The migration itself came down to two intense days moving content and styles from the dev site to the live environment alongside the internal comms team and content owners.
Governance and training documentation were handed over to give the team what they needed to keep it alive without my involvement. The plan is to maintain and improve it over time, which was always the goal.
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
