Summary
A Scroll content designer worked alongside a Department for Transport (DfT) digital team to develop a brand new intranet. We audited thousands of pages of content, engaged stakeholders across multiple sites and created something based entirely on user needs.
DfT chose Scroll to work on this project because of our expertise in user-focused content design and our stakeholder management skills.
The challenges
The DfT’s old intranet was showing its age. It was bloated with thousands of pages of content, some hard to understand, some obsolete. It was difficult for staff to find the information they needed, and to trust the information they found. Owners of content were disengaged, or struggling to manage huge volumes of content. The CMS was also old, with limited functionality.
A survey found that 75% of staff felt negative or neutral about the existing intranet.
DfT needed to start from scratch and develop a brand new intranet. They wanted streamlined content, designed so people could easily find clear, accurate information. They aimed to increase engagement with the intranet, and use it to spark conversation, comment and input.
What the client said
“Scroll were an asset to the project and integral to its success. The Scroll content designer was able to work both independently and as part of a team as necessary and their expert knowledge of content design was clear. They produced high quality content to optimistic timescales and with challenging subject matter experts. Their in-depth understanding of content design meant they needed minimal supervision which enabled the project manager to focus on other key areas of the project.”
Digital Content and Intranet Manager, Internal Communications, Department for Transport
The solution
A Scroll content designer worked closely with a DfT product manager on the project. This was run as an agile project, using tools including Trello, with fortnightly sprints and retrospectives.
DfT had already done some initial research (discovery), looking at the analytics for the intranet and working out users’ top tasks (the most important things people used the intranet for). We used the results of this research to identify user needs and to map out the 50 most important user journeys.
Another government department had recently completed a similar project, and we were able to use their proven content model to inform the information architecture and navigation for the new intranet.
The next step was to write a style guide for the new content – an important tool to help set the standards, tone and best practice guidelines for all future intranet content.
Then, armed with the data and the user journey maps, we started talking to stakeholders. We met with each content owner to discuss their content and to make sure that we took business requirements as well as user needs into account.
After this, we were ready to start developing the first drafts of all the new content. We based everything we wrote on the evidence we had – using the same language as users, developing content to meet user needs and to fit user journeys.
We made sure that content owners and other stakeholders were involved and engaged as much as possible in the project. Content owners, as subject matter experts, checked each draft for accuracy, made suggestions for amends and eventually signed off the content.
We were aware that we were asking content owners to do a lot of work on top of their normal day jobs. To help keep the project on track, we ran a series of training workshops with content owners. We used these to explain the rationale for paring down the content, and for keeping things as clear and simple as possible for users.
These sessions helped expose some of the misconceptions people had about content – for example, that it’s always safest to publish as much detail as possible (when in fact this was leading to users getting lost in the huge volumes of content). They helped people understand why their content was in such radically different shape. We also found that people responded more quickly to requests and made fewer changes to our draft content if they had been to a workshop, which kept the whole process moving.
Results
Content was greatly reduced across the site. In one key example content was reduced from over 140 pieces of content to less than 20 pieces of content.
- Streamlined new intranet
- Content drastically reduced from thousands of pages to hundreds
- Analytics show more people are using the new intranet – increased user engagement
- Staff embraced new functionality – intranet content is now inspiring comment and conversation
- Senior management team extremely happy with result – and it was endorsed by the Permanent Secretary
