Designing and launching a digital workplace for 1,300+ employees

Problem

One workplace, eight departments, growing complexity

Kinectrics relied on its intranet as a central place for employees to access company information, department resources, communications, forms, and internal tools. But as the organization grew, so did the complexity behind that experience: more than 1,300 employees across eight departments, each with its own content, workflows, and requirements.

I joined the effort to rethink this environment as a more scalable digital workplace—one that could support different departments while still feeling like one connected employee experience.

Discovery

Looking inside and outside the organization for evidence

I started by speaking with IT, HR, stakeholders, and experienced employees to understand the existing intranet from inside the organization—what was difficult, what employees felt was missing, what needed improvement, and what organizational and technical constraints we needed to consider.

I then looked outside Kinectrics for additional perspectives. I studied both large technology companies and organizations closer to Kinectrics’ industry and scale, and spoke with an employee at a large technology company about how their intranet fit into everyday work.

Goals

Turning research into four experience priorities

After bringing the internal and external research together, I organized what the new digital workplace needed to support into four experience goals:

These priorities gave me a framework for evaluating the information architecture, homepage content, and functionality as the design developed.

Information Architecture

Turning a large content environment into clearer paths

With more than 120 pages of content spanning multiple departments, the redesign required more than reorganizing a navigation menu. I used research findings and card sorting with department stakeholders to rethink how information should be categorized, grouped, and accessed across the workplace.

Rather than optimizing for the fewest possible clicks, I prioritized clear, predictable paths—helping employees understand where they were, where information belonged, and how to move toward what they needed.

Old structure → Card sorting & findings → New IA

Platform

Learning SharePoint before designing deeper into the experience

SharePoint Online was new to me, so I spent time understanding its components, search and permissions, responsive behavior, integrations, performance considerations, and technical limitations.

Understanding the platform’s capabilities and constraints helped me evaluate ideas against what could realistically be built. Rather than designing an ideal experience and discovering limitations at handoff, I could make design decisions with both employee needs and Kinectrics’ enterprise environment in mind.

Departments

One structure still had to work for eight different departments

I met with SharePoint managers from individual departments to introduce the new direction and understand their existing content, problems, requests, and priorities.

Together, we reviewed what information each department needed to maintain and how it should be organized. This helped me adapt the broader information architecture to different departmental needs while working toward a consistent experience across the intranet.

Exploration

Exploring how the new workplace could come together

With the structure and platform constraints clearer, I explored multiple homepage directions rather than committing to the first concept. The alternatives compared different approaches to content hierarchy, information density, section organization, and responsive behavior across desktop and mobile.

I reviewed early concepts with smaller groups, including IT and Marketing, to surface issues and refine the strongest directions before broader testing.

Testing

Using feedback to refine the direction

I evaluated the emerging experience through A/B testing, stakeholder feedback, and component comparisons across desktop and mobile. The goal was to understand how individual design choices affected the homepage as a whole before finalizing the direction.

For example, I compared two approaches to upcoming events. Larger cards provided more event information and direct calendar access, but took up significantly more homepage space. Compact cards displayed more events with less scrolling, but required employees to open an event for additional details and actions.

These comparisons helped surface the tradeoffs behind each direction rather than treating individual components in isolation.

Constraints

Designing with enterprise realities in the room

As the designs became more detailed, I evaluated them against the realities of Kinectrics’ enterprise environment. I investigated homepage performance across desktop and mobile using SharePoint Page Diagnostics, reviewing factors such as page weight, images, video, and web parts.

Not every technical option was available. For example, enabling a CDN was explored as a way to improve performance but ruled out because of security requirements. Constraints around performance, security, permissions, search, and SharePoint capabilities became part of the design decisions—not problems left for implementation.

Final Design

Bringing the four experience goals into one digital workplace

The final experience brought together a central homepage, department resources, company news and communications, search, employee services, and responsive access across desktop and mobile.

Rather than treating these as separate features, the redesigned workplace connected them around the four goals established earlier: helping employees Find information, Stay informed, Connect with colleagues, and Participate in company culture.

Launch

Taking the design from prototype to organization-wide implementation

Bringing the experience to launch required ongoing coordination with department representatives, IT, and other stakeholders. Content, layouts, approvals, permissions, technical configuration, and migration progressed at different rates, so implementation required adapting to each department while maintaining consistency across the broader experience.

The major intranet implementation took approximately seven months, expanding across 8 departments and 120+ pages for an organization of 1,300+ employees.

Post-Launch

The live product created a new source of evidence

After launch, we added a feedback box directly to the homepage, giving employees a simple way to share feedback and recommendations while using the new experience.

Company-wide input helped reveal what employees wanted improved after using the workplace in their day-to-day work, creating an ongoing source of evidence for future iterations.

Outcome

From an outdated intranet to a digital workplace at organizational scale

The work moved beyond concepts into an implemented digital workplace spanning eight departments, 120+ pages, and more than 1,300 employees.

The project strengthened my understanding of enterprise product design: creating a coherent experience meant balancing employee needs with department requirements, platform capabilities, security, performance, and the realities of implementation.