Tatasteel
Intranet Redesign

Creating and implementing a new look & feel of an existing intranet in a challenging environment.

The Brief

The Client

Tatasteel is a large Indian steel manufacturer with over 80.000 employees. It has locations all over the world. One of these locations is the former Koninglijke Hoogovens in Ijmuiden, which was where my assignment took place.

Tatasteel relies on their own intranet to get its news, policies, safety information, and community interaction out to all its employees.

Their wishes

Early in 2019, Tatasteel rolled out their new Sharepoint-based intranet site together with their new Content Management system (CMS) in the back-end. For the next phase, they wanted to have a new look & feel for their intranet users built around a responsive search based interface.

The team working on this was missing someone who has an expertise in designing. This is where I joined the Business team as an expert designer.

Their challenges

A few page designs were ready. However, there were still missing a few key pages, and there were no designs detailing the tablet and mobile layout.

The design and coding team was located in India. This meant I had to contact and work with them remotely and at set times.

Due to the newness of the intranet, there were still some teething issues in the form of (un)forseen technical bugs and limitations.

The process

Using the few existing page designs, I started working on the designs for the search page as this was a key design missing for desktop.

For this I focused on using established design patterns to make using the search page as easy and straightforward as possible for the user.

Then I started working out the layout and re-usable components for the Tablet and Mobile designs. The external team would be able to use this to work out every page in detail.

Next, I guided the external team with daily calls, meetings, advice, and designs whilst they further fleshed out the individual pages. This was combined with constantly monitoring the quality of the work, and steering the team.

This resulted in a flexible work process where any problems that came up were quickly nipped in the bud. It also made sure that the designs were kept in line with the business requirements, and that changes that supported the business requirements were quickly able to be iterated on and implemented.

The designs were now finished and approved by the Business. Together with an expert colleague on front end programming, I assisted in the correct technical implementation of the design so that the business goals were met.

With my knowledge of the design and reasoning of choices, and his expertise in front-end development, we were able to quickly address questions and problems from the external team whilst they were implementing the designs. We further checked the code for quality, maintainablility, and if it fulfilled the business requirements.

Results and testimonials

With the designs finished and implemented, the Tatasteel Intranet had a succesful launch. Below you can find various pages of the final Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile designs which are now live on the Tatasteel intranet.