Local Council Staff Intranet

Local Council Staff Intranet

Situation:

As part of their digital transformation programme, South Somerset District Council required a supplier with the right mix of Discovery and Umbraco development skills to assist in designing and implementing their new Umbraco staff Intranet. The scope of work covered architecture, site design, development, training, knowledge transfer and support of the local team.

Their in-house developers had great Umbraco skills, but where over stretched. An important role we played was making the best use of their developers to ensure we delivered the solution as quickly and cost effectively as possible, with total visibility, close collaboration and knowledge sharing/transfer throughout the project.

Solution:

The project commenced with a full review of their existing intranet, content, analytics and user data, followed by  discovery workshops where we worked with South Somerset District Council  to define the UX and IA, plus overall goals, content priorities, task groupings etc.

From here, our UX and design team worked in collaboration with South Somerset District Council  to define the IA, content structure and user journeys, which were then tested through user interviews and card-sorting techniques. Once refined, we finalised the sitemap, wireframes, style library and look and feel, ultimately leading to page designs and templates. Our Umbraco developers then partnered with South Somerset District Council  internal dev team to provide the build through iterative agile development sprints.

The overall process took a user first approach and followed the Council’s brand guidelines and the GDS Service Design Manual, to a minimum of WCAG AA standards compliance.

Affinity provided further support through training sessions with their content editors and contributors.

Results:

Establishing the optimal Information architecture and user journeys on this project was a key requirement as the whole oganisation has been through a complete transformation with every role in the business changing. 

Since its launch the Intranet has been widely accepted and praised by the staff. We are running a continual improvement plan and review the intranet front end regularly offering recommendations and support to the comms team.

and now...

Affinity is delighted to still be maintaining and improving the South Somerset District Council Intranet and we are delighted to have been invited to help design their new Website. Watch this space...