Building a Fresh Intranet Experience Inside a Restricted System

Challenge

RD Consulting was engaged to redesign a Department of Health intranet serving two distinct audiences with very different needs and workflows — all within the constraints of an enterprise SharePoint platform not exactly known for design flexibility. The brief called for something slick, readable, and genuinely usable, while staying true to (and gently pushing) the department’s existing style guide. The central tension: how to deliver a fresh, considered design experience on a platform that resists customisation at almost every turn.

Approach

Our designers began by getting close to the users, running interviews and co-design workshops with both audience groups to understand their daily workflows, frustrations, and what “good” would actually look like. These sessions directly shaped the design direction rather than simply validating it afterward.

In parallel, the team researched best-of-breed examples of what other organisations had achieved within SharePoint’s limitations, treating the platform itself as a constraint to design with, not around.

From there, our designers iterated on a set of visual design templates across three rounds of feedback, continually checking feasibility by building and testing directly in the SharePoint editor — there’s little value in a design that can’t actually be built in its intended environment.

To bring the concepts to life for testing, the team created an interactive prototype mimicking real day-to-day workflows, then ran one-on-one user testing sessions with 13 users across both audiences, observing how they navigated and explored the prototype as they would in their actual jobs. These insights fed directly back into refining the final designs.

Impact

RD Consulting delivered a practical, user-friendly toolkit wrapped in a fresh, colourful visual design — a meaningful step up from the platform’s usual limitations.

Beyond the final designs, the project delivered a genuine roadmap for the future: an implementation guide, install instructions, and a set of future-state opportunities, giving the department a clear path for continued improvement well beyond this initial delivery.