NSW Telco Authority, making a useful intranet
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.
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
We began by exploring whether people actually wanted an intranet and what problems or opportunities they associated with it. Conversations with Telco staff revealed that overall sentiment was positive – good news.
Key insight – We want organisational clarity
About 90% of participants stated they wanted more clarity across the organisation, everything from team overviews to detailed individual capabilities.
I recognised the risk of recommended detailed team pages – content can atrophy quickly – but the need was clear. After presenting the key insights with senior leaders, they backed the plan for high level team content.
Key insight – there is lots on the intranet 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 – poor onboarding led to disengaged staff
An unexpected pain point I heard over and again related was that inconsistent onboarding meant different levels of org knowledge, alignment to principles and ability to self serve.
I worked closely with the office of the Managing Director to combine multiple pdfs into one online on-boarding guide. If busy hiring managers could send new starters to a single screen intranet for a solid overview it could provide a foundation that teams could build on.
Principles
Through testing, research and consultation, it became clear that a pragmatic, out-of-the-box approach was essential to the project’s success. This meant letting go of several features proposed in the early phases. Organisations do not need another digital asset that is difficult to maintain, so finding the right balance between desirability and feasibility was key to giving the site greater longevity.
My design principles were:
- Fewer PDFs
- Consistent template layouts
- Clear documentation
- Clear visual styles for different link types
- Minimal use of graphics and images
- 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
