Objective
Define and build a platform to replace the existing no longer fit for purpose intranet for the East London Foundation Trust – a 5,000-staff mental health service and community healthcare provider based in East London, Bedfordshire and Luton.
The photograph shows the reception desk at an ELFT hospital; a good indication of the content that needed to be easily accessible on the intranet!
Stakeholder interviews
We began with a series of interviews with project owners and influencers to identify the key business drivers.
Contextual Interviews
We followed this with a series of interviews with a broad range of users – at their place of work wherever possible.
User Survey
We followed up the interviews with a broader user survey to quantify staff priorities.
Workshop
We then returned to the stakeholders for a 1-day workshop to:
- Present our findings
- Generate (and align on) ideas
- Prioritise functionalities and features
Open card sort & site architecture
Finally, we arrived at the design phase, beginning with a card sort with 50 users to design a structure that represented how staff think, and how the platform should be organised.
Sketch and wireframe from the inside out
Our approach focuses first on the content – the end point of our users’ journey. Once these pages were discussed, sketched, wireframed and put through some basic guerrilla tests, we zoomed out to tackle the pages that directly link to this content, and finally the homepage.
The images above show iterations of the same wireframe in response to user testing.
Design
Finally, we added the finishing touches to the platform through colour, fonts and styling.
Build and final testing
Now we had been through several iterations and testing procedures, all that was left was to build.
Content population
Once all the pages and templates had been set up for an area, the communications team set about migrating content from the old platform to the new.
Beta Launch and Final Tweaks
For the final round of testing and iterative updates, the site was released to a small group of early pioneers. No major bombshells were uncovered, and some of the quick-wins were implemented.
Launch
The soft launch proved useful, as it emerged that some departments – despite giving approval – did not evaluate their section content until it was live! A useful lesson that has since been applied to all our implementations.