The Solution
Elcom worked with the Vita team on the design and build of the original intranet back in 2011.
As the information management portion of the platform continued to deliver, the Vita team chose to redesign their intranet in-house. The team sought feedback and suggestions from team members, and utilised behavioural data from Google Analytics, which identified key content that team members were routinely searching for, how they reached that information, and how deep team members had to navigate before they found the right content. This data clearly indicated that search was the preferred method, and that search needed to be front and centre (and accurate).
On the live site, Vita created a masterpage with the prototype of the new design. They put it in a separate folder, selected team members to use it as their daily driver, and collected feedback via a Yammer group. Once this feedback was collected and analysed in concert with analytical behavioural data, the team built masterpages on a staging server, which allowed them to design it in the background without disrupting content publishers.
When they were ready, moving everything across from staging to production was really easy, and took a single admin one weekend to implement, without taking the live site offline.
Vita’s redesigned intranet is personalised based on role and business area, powered by permissions within Active Directory groups, resulting in a need to design and maintain one version of a page. For example a clinician working in an Artisan clinic is shown an Artisan navigation menu item, alongside standard menu items linking to common services for all team members. They would also see corporate news and Artisan-related news, displayed via dynamic widgets which brings like-minded articles together onto one page, as well as updates from the Artisan Yammer group.
The team took the opportunity to implement live search, enabling team members to check their search as they go, rather than needing to navigate forward and back to refine their search. The team also created a custom solution via Code Blocks to surface the top four articles viewed by team members in the same roles over a rolling 14 day period. These top four articles are presented as four buttons under the search bar, which updates in real-time – very similar to how Chrome and Firefox present most visited sites under a search bar when opening a new window – resulting in fewer searches.
The team uses Code Blocks regularly, allowing them to write custom front-end scripting code to embed extra functionality onto pages as needed by publishers without code experience. A great example of this powers Vita’s ‘Topic to a page’ micro-sites. These pages split content across multiple tabs, using code blocks and layout templates, presenting a lot of content in a nicely formatted yet easy to use, maintainable, and mobile-responsive way.
A more advanced example is the leaderboard for Vita’s rewards program. The code to run the data is stored in Vita’s intranet as a code block, pulling in data, and keeping the code on the intranet platform, allowing Vita to power interactive leaderboards on the intranet platform without needing to use and maintain other servers.