Designing an accessible intranet at Essex Council
The challenge
Essex County Council (ECC) employs a large number of people across many sites, including remote workers and contractors who work out and about throughout the county.
The existing intranet was being redesigned from the back end to the front end. The aims were to:
create accessible and efficient user journeys for council employees wanting to perform simple tasks such as booking annual leave or finding out about printers
make sure it’s easy to find content on the intranet, whether a user wants to browse or use the internal search function
provide access for people working for the council who don’t have a council sign-in, including people working on roads or peripatetic music teachers
upgrade the CMS to Local Gov Drupal so the council could become part of a growing community of councils using the platform
With thousands of webpages and complex user journeys to transform within a tight timeframe, ECC needed some extra content design support and help getting a working structure for the site together.
The solution
Scroll provided a team to work alongside ECC staff. Our work included:
redesigning the information architecture
supporting extensive user research to make sure that users were at the centre of all the content design decisions
improving user journeys so that hand-off to other platforms that ECC uses was not confusing
reducing the number of pages on the intranet by streamlining or retiring content, making the site easier to navigate and giving users greater confidence that content is up to date
rewriting content so it’s easier to read and navigate, by applying best practice content design principles and using plain English
What they say about working with Scroll
“We are very happy with the quality of the content design service provided by Scroll. The Scroll content designers were an invaluable part of our team, juggling time pressures and multiple stakeholders to produce a high standard of content. Their expertise and can-do attitude made it possible for us to deliver a significantly improved intranet for the council.”
Louise Wheeler, Senior Content Designer, Essex County Council
Results
Qualitative user testing showed that user experience was improved across the site and users felt more confident acting on the information they read.
Redundant content and out of date information has been removed and updated, resetting the intranet as a trusted single point of truth.
The refreshed information architecture and page content provide a much simpler site for users to navigate and for content editors to publish their content on.
Employee engagement with the publishing process has improved. There is clear governance and editorial processes and guidelines, supported by the legal team.
The new intranet is more cost-efficient and greener to run.