NHS

Intranet redesign

Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust delivers mental health services to over a million patients a year. Its intranet was twelve years old, clinical staff routinely could not find information and systems they needed or worked from old versions that were out of date, creating high clinical risk environment. 

Increased platform visits
0 %
Reduction in support emails
0 %
Users
Clinical and corporate staff across the Trust
Ownership
Taxonomy, structure, homepage and priority areas
Role
Sole designer

Approach

I mapped the existing site structure and used Google Analytics to identify the high-traffic areas, which gave me a sitemap and a clear order of priority.

I then facilitated a closed card sort with representation from both clinical and corporate delivery services.

A taxonomy built without clinical input would have reflected the organisation’s structure rather than the way its staff actually work.

Outputs from information architecture card sort and site map of new platform taxonomy

In the same workshop we identified the priority areas and the top three critical use cases each one had to serve. That let me tailor sections of the intranet to individual departments rather than forcing a single homepage to serve everybody equally badly.

Drafts of individual homepages drawn up during the information architecture workshop

I wireframed the new homepage and the key areas the workshop identified. The brief ran past taxonomy, structure and functionality both needed rebuilding. I guerrilla-tested the wireframes with clinical and corporate staff, which sharpened areas like quicklinks.

Initial wireframes of the new home page and areas identified key areas

Challenge

Twelve years of minor technical updates had left the intranet with no structural ownership. Staff could not find content, and what they did find was frequently out of date.

Some of the old site had to stay reachable. Low traffic did not mean low importance; parts of it were business-critical precisely because they were needed rarely and urgently.

The hardest constraint was access to the people I was designing for. Clinical staff needed to see patients, and research time competed directly with that. So I built a feedback bar into the launch and ran it for the first month, which kept insight coming from front-line staff without taking them away from their work.

The bar used to gain user feedback
The feedback bar used on the new intranet system to gain initial insight and overcome the difficulties with access to front-line staff

Outcome

Visits to the platform rose 40%, and support emails fell by over 20%.

The redesigned site ran on a refined taxonomy with updated content, weighting priority information and high-traffic functions accordingly. I rebuilt search and added filtering, so staff could narrow results rather than scroll through them.

Final homepage design, with large focused links to core areas
Improved education and training section with a dedicated policies area

Reference

"Aaron came to work for Sussex Partnership straight from University. I was really impressed with his drive, talent and work ethic. Aaran was extremely self-motivated, keeping abreast of the latest UX thinking, which massively contributed to the quality of the digital products delivered."
Theresa Jones
Head of IT Solutions and Delivery

StepStone

Conversion  optimisation

Rebuilt registration around the questions people could actually answer first time

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