The intranet had lower employee engagement than the people team had expected. Employees only visited the intranet if they needed to find information on company policies, benefits, etc. Rarely did they stay to check anything else, unless there’s a new spotlight image signaling an upcoming company event. The low engagement rate was an opportunity to reimagine the product to increase company engagement.

The team felt the new intranet should be..

When it came to redesigning the intranet, we knew how important it was to get it right. The design team discussed how the new intranet should look and function. We wanted people-centric features like company news, announcements, social feed, and events. The rest of the project team agreed.

The design team drafted some ideas of how the new intranet would look and function with these features in mind. Through every exploration and reiteration, it brought us closer to the final product.

The people team wanted the product to launch in the next 3 months. (At this point, we were about 1.5-2 months in after completing the designs and handoff.) With the remaining months left, there was not enough time to reconfigure the old intranet or develop a new product from scratch in the next 2 months. It wasn’t a feasible deadline for our lead software engineer.
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However, our incredible engineer managed to find a third party platform to help build our vision for The Roots. The third party platform, Lumapps, had most of the pre-built modules we wanted for our intranet. It was a quicker solution to getting the project up and running immediately.

Nixed - Top Personalized Section of Employee’s Calendars
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The top personalized section of employee's calendars was one of the driving features of our original design. The project team decided it wasn’t a top priority to include this in the first roll out. There wasn't enough time to create this feature and employees wouldn't have used it as often.

In it's place, we used a spotlight section most Leaf Group employees are familiar with. The people team wanted to keep the spotlight function, so they can have nice visuals of upcoming events.