Before redesigning a company intranet, the most effective move is to listen to the people who use it every day: that is the principle behind the intranet audit commissioned by an Italian railway transport company — a long-standing intranet.ai client — before any redesign work began.
3 key figures
- 5 focus groups with employees from different departments, age groups, and seniority levels
- 1 month the company-wide survey remained open
- 4 months total duration of the analysis phase before the redesign started
The starting point: an intranet built by accumulation
The company already had a working intranet, built over time by layering standard SharePoint features with custom-developed components. It was functional, but it had grown through successive requests rather than through intentional design.
The navigation menu had been assembled one item at a time — each time a new section was needed — with no structural logic capable of guiding future choices. The result was a navigation organised around departments rather than around user needs. A dedicated “Human Resources” menu item existed, for example, but gave users no indication of what they would actually find inside it.
One particularly telling signal came from an analysis of the most frequent user searches: one of the most sought-after pieces of information was the company org chart, buried deep inside an HR document library among thousands of other files. Content that should be immediately visible had, over time, become nearly impossible to find.
Intelligent search was another critical pain point: the search bar only returned useful results when users already knew the exact title of the document they were looking for, and failed almost entirely on natural-language or generic keyword queries.
The solution: a structured intranet audit across four parallel workstreams
The intranet.ai team proposed splitting the work into two macro phases: first a thorough analysis of the existing platform, then — based on the evidence gathered — defining the roadmap for the intranet redesign itself.
The audit phase ran across four parallel workstreams:
- Technical navigation mapping: every item in the existing menu was analysed in detail, documenting the logic (or absence of it) behind each structural choice.
- Usage data analysis: a full year of data from the intranet analytics tool already in use helped identify which pages were visited most, which news items were actually read, and which tasks users performed most frequently.
- Company-wide survey: open to the entire workforce for one full month, it returned quantitative signals on the friction points users experienced most often.
- Five focus groups: run in the weeks following the survey, each one hour long, with seven or eight participants selected from different departments, age groups, and seniority levels — to ensure the most representative sample possible.
Each focus group followed a three-stage structure. Sessions opened with a collection of recent, concrete examples of how participants had used the intranet, anchoring the discussion in real episodes rather than generic impressions. The second stage guided conversation around the three improvement priorities that had emerged from the survey: the document area, the personal area, and information search. Each session closed with an open-ended round where participants were invited to describe their ideal future intranet.
All the evidence — technical, quantitative, and qualitative — fed into a synthesis document that included wireframe mockups of the home page and five core pages, plus a proposed new navigation menu organised around scalable macro-topics: any future content would have a natural, pre-planned home, without needing to rethink the structure each time.
The outcome: decisions driven by evidence, not assumptions
The immediate value of this project is not measured in traffic metrics — the new intranet had not yet been built when the analysis was delivered. It is measured in the quality of the information gathered, which transformed the redesign from an intuition-driven project into one grounded in real evidence.
The audit confirmed the critical issues the intranet.ai team had already hypothesised during the initial platform review: unintuitive navigation, an inconsistently organised document area, a low-performing search function, and a significant share of outdated content appearing among the top results — a sign of an editorial governance challenge that will need to be addressed alongside the technical document management redesign.
Direct conversations with employees surfaced concrete requests that a purely technical analysis would never have uncovered:
- The need to consolidate into a single portal information currently scattered across multiple channels
- A desire for search tools capable of interpreting natural-language queries rather than requiring exact keywords
- Repeated requests for a chatbot able to guide users through content navigation
- Personalisation: a space for saved and favourite content, built around each person’s role — supported by a richer people directory and personal profile
These needs, surfaced directly from employees through the focus groups, represent exactly the kind of insight that no technical audit alone could have delivered.
What comes next
Building on the project document delivered at the end of the audit phase, the company will move into the full implementation phase. The priorities already identified include:
- Restructuring the document area around topics rather than departments
- Digitalising processes still tied to paper forms, with structured company departments spaces
- Introducing user experience personalisation features
- Evaluating intelligent search and chatbot tools, requested repeatedly throughout the focus groups
- Strengthening internal communication as an integrated part of the new platform
A structured intranet audit, conducted before redesigning a single page, makes it possible to build a new intranet around the real needs of the people who will use it every day — not only around what seems most urgent from the inside.
Considering an intranet redesign and want to start with a solid foundation? Book a demo and find out how intranet.ai can guide you through every stage of the process.