A responsive intranet developed on SharePoint 2013 on Premise with Skype for Business integration

SharePoint consultancy, UX & development to build a digital workplace serving a diverse user base of 1,700 people

The brief

The Institute for Cancer Research (ICR) is one of the world’s most influential cancer research institutes, with an outstanding record of achievement dating back more than 100 years. ICR London operates as a research institute, a higher education institution and an exempt charity.

Content Formula was responsible for the digital workspace strategy, information architecture and user experience, graphic design, development using our in-house team, deployment and post-launch support. The project had the following objectives:

connect people, promote knowledge sharing and communication, and foster collaboration - both within and outside of the ICR network.
provide easy and fast access to relevant information
provide staff and students with access to a range of tools and functions that will make their working lives easier
promote the ICR brand and organisational culture
develop a cost-effective and sustainable platform

Our approach

We proposed a partially bespoke solution to deliver ICR’s priority requirements utilising pre-designed templates as the requirements matched the features of these templates. This allowed us to reduce costs without any compromise on requirements.

We started with a discovery phase to gather information and insight to inform both the initial strategy for the site, and how the site should be maintained and developed moving forwards.

In the IA and UX phase we developed a set of interactive wireframes to reflect the output of the discovery phase. We ran testing on these wireframes with real users, and also tested the navigation using tree-testing. After, we were happy with the performance of the wireframes in tests, we then applied the ICR branded design to all the templates. The site was then built over five 2-week sprints, tested and the features and functionality developed demoed to the client for feedback and iteration.

One particularly interesting aspect of this project was the collaboration spaces. We modified SharePoint team sites to provide a very streamlined and intuitive place for team and project collaboration – with a personal activity feed for users on the intranet homepage. Also, because the ICR were already using Skype for Business, we integrated these collaboration spaces with Skype, so that each group had an associated group chat within the Skype for Business client.

The result

Collaboration area usage has increased by 139%
418% increase in usage of the policy library
19% sustained increase in traffic vs the previous intranet
The improved information architecture has seen reliance on search drop by 7%

All opinions expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of the ICR.

"The ICR’s new intranet is a big step forward on our old one. It has a striking design, easy-to-use navigation system, fresh content, and a range of new functionalities. Content Formula understood the ICR’s requirements, and applied their detailed knowledge of SharePoint to craft a dynamic and modern new system. They found imaginative ways of putting into use out-of-the-box SharePoint functionalities, making the new intranet as useful as possible while minimising costs."

Richard Hoey, Director of Communications