NBC - Intranet homepage
Client
Northern Beaches Council
My role
UX / UI designer
Deliverables
Research, IA, wireframes, UI design
Platform
SharePoint intranet
Overview
Northern Beaches Council was formed by merging three former councils. Each brought its own intranet, its own document libraries and its own way of naming things. Staff told us the same thing in almost every conversation: "I know the page exists, I just can't find it."
This project reimagined the intranet homepage as a search-first entry point. Instead of a wall of news and department links, the homepage now leads with one prominent search box, the tools people use every day, and content that is personalised to the staff member's team and location.
The challenge
- Three legacy intranets with overlapping and contradictory content.
- Search returned thousands of results, with old policies ranking above current ones.
- The homepage was owned by Communications and treated as a news feed, not a working tool.
- Field and depot staff mostly used phones or shared kiosks, but the layout was desktop only.
Research
I ran a short discovery phase to understand what staff actually came to the intranet to do, rather than what each department wanted to publish.
Search log analysis
Reviewed six months of search queries to find the top tasks, spelling variations and dead-end searches.
Staff interviews
Spoke with people from libraries, waste services, planning, HR and the customer contact centre.
Card sorting
Open and closed card sorts to test the labels staff used for the most common content groups.
Tree testing
Validated the proposed navigation before any visual design was started.
What we learned
A very small number of tasks accounted for most visits: leave forms, pay and payslips, the staff directory, IT help and policies. People rarely browsed. They searched, and if search failed they asked a colleague. That insight set the direction: make search excellent and put the top five tasks one click away.
Design
The homepage was rebuilt around three zones, prioritised from top to bottom:
- Search. A single large search box with type-ahead suggestions, best-bet results for top tasks and filters for people, documents and pages.
- My tools. Quick links to the systems each person uses most, based on their role, with the option to pin their own.
- News and notices. Council-wide announcements moved below the fold, with team-specific notices surfaced first.
The UI followed the council's brand guidelines but stripped back decoration so the page loads quickly on mobile and on the shared terminals used at depots. Every component was designed with a mobile-first layout and tested against WCAG 2.1 AA.
Outcome
The new homepage launched alongside the integrated search work and became the model for the rest of the intranet. Content owners now use the search reports to decide what to fix next, which keeps the site improving after the project ended.
See the companion project: NBC – Integrated search.