Digital Workplace
Sharepoint-enabled intranet product
MY RESPONSIBILITIES: product design | brand development | strategic positioning | UX design | UI design | design system development | style guide development | graphic design | copywriting
The Digital Workplace ("DW") is a rapid-build intranet deployment system. It was designed and developed from a Sharepoint base by my former employer Diversus (ICT and Management Consulting firm based out of Perth, Western Australia.)
DW's biggest advantages over standard SharePoint are its speed of implementation, its fully-customisable interface and its large suite of pre-built, modular functions; it allows Diversus to design and deploy a fully-functional intranet for a large enterprise client over a period of weeks, instead of months.
Enterprises using the product enjoy enormous control over their intranet's features. It comes with its own fully-integrated social media platform, which has been shown to improve staff collaboration and communication across an entire enterprise, as well as opening up numerous internal communications opportunities.
When I came on board with this project, the back-end was essentially completed, but it was still using SharePoint's default UI - it had no visual identity system of its own. It had no logo, no branding or promotional materials, no design system, no visual design assets, no documentation and no iconography... it was essentially a software product without a face.
Over the period of my employment with Diversus, I designed and developed an entirely new default UI, design system and visual design style guide from scratch. I also designed and developed all its associated brand design materials, including logos, stationery, promotional brochures, digital assets, social media icons and technical documentation templates.
As I was designing both a default screen-based UI and a print-focused style guide at the same time, it made sense to construct them both around a common design grid.
When developing the default UI, we made a deliberate decision to eschew all existing SharePoint design cues. While this dramatically increased the UI development workload and time-frame, it was a necessary step to better position and differentiate DW in the minds of its key audiences.
After the default UI redesign was completed, I then incorporated and integrated several visual design cues into all DW's print-based materials.
These materials included sales and promotional materials, technical documentation templates, the DW branding style guide and other internal visual-development guidance materials created specifically for Diversus' SharePoint developers, to facilitate visual design decisions during development.
Since its launch, DW has been successfully implemented at numerous large state and national enterprises, including one of Australia's leading national health insurance firms.
