Out-of-the-box intranets can be challenging to get right. Many organizations build them only to find they aren’t as well-utilized as they could be, and communication professionals find themselves relying on other ways of sharing information.
Intranets have great potential to be a central place for information, news, and access to key systems. At the Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation (the Guardians), human-centered design helped us build an intranet that achieved just that. We were honored to be awarded a Gold Quill Award for this work.
Understanding the Problem
The Guardians’ intranet, SuperCharged, launched in 2013. Ten years later, it was a valued resource for its team of over 200 Auckland-based staff, averaging 1,144 daily views. However, SuperCharged’s mature technology posed security and maintenance risks. To mitigate these risks, a business case was approved to upgrade it to a more modernized platform.
The project’s discovery research revealed a deeper need than platform migration alone. Subject matter experts shared that more than 60% of their content was outdated, with an additional 20% no longer relevant. Users often struggled to find information and didn’t trust the information they could find. It became clear that updating content could help to make it more findable, usable, and trusted.
Measuring Success
The Guardians team launched a project to completely redevelop its intranet with the vision: "Wherever you are, you can access news, content, and systems, to do what you need to do." The project team established clear, measurable metrics for success, including the following:
- Number of unique visitors
- Retention rate
- Time saved completing tasks
- Trust in information
- User comfort with the intranet
- Launch feedback sentiment
- Menu structure testing
- Improved search ranking accuracy
Measurements following the project showed it met or exceeded all targets.
Human-centered Design
The human-centered design approach was frequently highlighted as a key factor that set the project apart and contributed to its success. So, what did this approach involve?
The project team engaged with two main stakeholder groups:
- Content owners: Subject matter experts who update the intranet pages.
- Users: People across the organization who access the intranet to find information they need to do their jobs.
For the latter, the team relied on a business user group that provided feedback throughout the project, including during codesign activities, to build intuitive experiences that are simple for users to navigate. These activities included helping to define the content structure (information architecture), page layouts and substance of each content page.
Users codesigned key elements of the intranet’s structure. For the information architecture, we conducted an open card sort activity where users organized tasks they typically complete on the intranet into logical groups and labeled those groups in their own words. To evaluate the findability of the existing and codesigned structures, we carried out tree testing, which helped us refine the menu structure by measuring how successful users were in identifying the correct page in the menu. This involved presenting users with a range of scenarios and providing them with the old and new menu structures, then asking them to identify where they would expect to find the information they are looking for, also known as tree testing. The tree testing revealed that this approach improved users’ chances of finding the correct page from 44% on the old intranet to 83% on the new one.
Users also codesigned the homepage layout by prioritizing the stacking order for mobile and indicating where they would look for each element on a desktop version of the homepage. This feedback helped create a heat map, which the project team used to develop a wireframe and prototype layout.
Accurate, Up-to-Date, Useful, and Consistent Content
People don’t come to the intranet for a technology platform itself, even if it’s a user friendly one — they come for information. The project team needed to make sure people could trust what they would find. Due to limited resources within the business, the project steering committee and leadership team set the expectation that the project team would lead the content redesign, rather than educating and empowering the content owners to take the lead.
Centralizing the content creation provided an opportunity for greater consistency across content in the intranet. The project team adhered to content principles based on best practices for designing web content published by the New Zealand, Australia, and United Kingdom governments. The team also created new templates to keep the page layouts consistent and help content owners do the same.
In drafting the content, the project team leveraged AI as a starting point — not verbatim, but for useful ideas for content to include. Drafts were reviewed by the content owners, as well as members of the business user group to ensure they met user needs.
The Launch
Stopping at designing a great intranet wouldn’t have been enough to be successful; rather, we needed to change mindsets and behaviors. The project team developed key messages and delivered them throughout the project, along with a creative communications campaign structured in three phases: tease, launch, and sustain. This included designing digital banners, intranet news items, blogs, in-person and virtual events, videos, eLearning, printed collateral, and a competition.
Keeping the Intranet Great Over Time
Now, over a year after its launch, the Guardians’ new intranet remains a trusted, widely used resource for its people. The team created an intranet that wasn’t just great on launch day but has the governance and structure to continue delivering benefits for all our employees well into the future.
To ensure users continue to find value, the communications team established clear roles for content owners, set reminders for content updates after one year, and created a Microsoft Teams based center of excellence with resources and guides for day-to-day support. They also foster an ongoing community for content owners through regular meetings to ensure content remains accurate, up to date, and consistent with our style. The communications team continues to gather broader user feedback and make continual improvements.
We’re thrilled with the outcome of this project and see it as a lesson: whether designing an intranet or any other solution, collaborating with users and prioritizing their needs can make all the difference.
About the Guardians
The Guardians was established to help reduce the tax burden on future generations of New Zealand’s ageing population. In the future, there will be more retired New Zealanders drawing on universal government pensions and fewer working-age people paying taxes to fund it. The New Zealand government invests money into a sovereign wealth fund — the NZ Super Fund — which is managed by the Guardians. More than 20 years on, the Guardians is the country’s largest investor.