Twenty years at Interact: Two decades of intranet design and user experience

I joined Interact in March 2007 with no real experience of intranets, intranet design, or intranet user experience. Twenty years on, it’s a decision that has hopefully paid off!

I’m writing a series of blogs to highlight what’s different, what’s the same, and how the humble intranet has become a powerhouse of global productivity. Part biography, part memoir, part industry reflection, I hope you’ll join me on this journey through intranets and industries, and share your thoughts as well.

From employee training to intranet user experience

When I joined Interact, I was employee number 23. People love to say they’ve been involved in things from day one, but in this case I really have. My background was in training. Not technology training, but the old-style kind that covered the full range of what a workforce actually looked like then: customer-facing staff, back-office teams, the people in the fleet yard organizing logistics, the drivers collecting and delivering cars at six in the morning. Different roles, different environments, and all with vastly different relationships with the systems they were expected to use every day.

“I was the living proof that the platform was genuinely accessible to someone without a technical background.”

I learned two important lessons early on. The first was that users are never a single homogeneous block. They have different needs, skills, and working conditions. The second was that systems built without that understanding technically worked, but they were rarely built with the person actually using them in mind.

When I arrived at Interact, the CEO made it plain: “You don’t know intranets, and that’s why we hired you.” I was the living proof that the platform was genuinely accessible to someone without a technical background and coming to it with a user-first mindset.

For a while, that’s what I was: the human demonstration that Interact really did deliver a simple-to-use platform. But I quickly noticed that the questions I was getting from customers didn’t actually have very much to do with the technology.

Why good intranet design starts with what people want

What people wanted to know almost every time was how others did it. What content do successful intranets carry, and how is it written? Do organizations lift and shift what already exists, or do they take the time to rethink it? What sits on the homepage, and is it one homepage for everyone, or does it vary by audience? What goes into a user profile, and what do you let people add themselves?

And a question I heard less frequently, which perhaps should have been the one asked most often: how do you make sure it’s as good on day 365 as it was on day one? In my experience, the organizations that don’t ask this question often find out why they should have.

That question was really about governance and the discipline of keeping quality and value high long after the launch excitement has faded. And it was a serious question, because in the late 2000s an intranet design was no small undertaking. These were on-premise platforms, accessed via a PC on a wired network. No cloud, no mobile app, no logging in from anywhere. The investment, in time, budget, and organizational will, was significant.

The people asking these questions had varying motives. Some were genuinely excited: they’d fought for an innovative employee website design that moved their organization forward. They believed in it, and they wanted to get it right. Others were more cautious, impacted by previous intranet design projects that hadn’t delivered what was promised. Both groups needed the same thing: a proven path to success, built on evidence of what good looks like, and the confidence to know they weren’t starting from scratch.

Why the best intranet design is based on real consensus

Historically, the challenge of an intranet design that satisfies both the user and the organization hasn’t been the technology itself. It’s the person with the biggest influence over the project.

In the earlier years, that was often the founder or CEO who had a fixed idea of what an internal employee website should look like. Because they were ever-present and an active part of the project team, when someone at that level says “I think what our users need is…” the rest of the team tends to agree.

I saw this happen time and again in card sorting sessions, the exercises used to develop an intranet’s structure and navigation. I would split participants into representative groups of users, give them the same task, and see what they came up with. And what often emerged was consensus, but not the honest kind. When different groups had reached different conclusions, they would often simply coalesce around whatever the most senior group had decided.

The ownership problem in employee website design

At larger organizations the problem didn’t disappear; the same scenario just played out differently. A Head of Department would often come in instead of the CEO, and the same situation would happen. I remember a conversation between a Director of Finance and an IT Manager, debating in which of their respective sections a policy document should live. A genuine tussle, and not an uncommon one, entirely about ownership rather than usability.

The answer, of course, was neither, and both. It belonged in a Policies section, tagged to Finance, tagged to IT, and listed alphabetically so that anyone looking for it could actually find it. But that solution required both parties to let go of the idea that the intranet was their platform. It wasn’t. It never is. It doesn’t belong to any one person or team; it belongs to the person trying to find the policy in a mad dash before a meeting begins.

How do you move from ownership to intranet user experience?

So I started doing something deliberately simple at the start of every card sorting session. Before we got into the details, I’d put two ideas on the flip chart (remember those). The first: don’t come to this exercise leading with “I think.” Come to it with “what would my colleagues think?” And the second: if you’re not sure what your colleagues would think, because you’ve been here long enough that the organization just makes sense to you, think about the person who hasn’t joined yet. The person who arrives in six months with fresh eyes and no institutional knowledge.

That question changed my entire thinking and became my north star. It still is.

Nearly twenty years on, the technology looks nothing like it did in 2008. We’ve moved from on-premise platforms with wired networks to cloud-based systems accessible from any device, anywhere. Navigation has evolved. Search has transformed. And now AI is reshaping what an intranet can do, by personalizing content, delivering information before you need to search for it, and reducing the friction between a question and an answer.

What changed in intranet design between 2008 and today:

Area	2008	Today
Platform	On-premise, installed and maintained by the organization	Cloud-based, updated continuously
Access	A PC on a wired office network	Any device, anywhere, including mobile
Launch effort	A significant investment in time, budget, and organizational will	Lighter to launch, but the day-365 governance question still applies
Finding information	Navigation designed up front, with limited search	Navigation has evolved, search has transformed
Personalization	A design decision made at launch: one homepage, or one per audience	AI personalizes content and delivers it before you search for it
The first design question	Does it work for the person who uses it?	Does it work for the person who uses it?

None of that surprises me, because technology evolves. It always has.

What I couldn’t have known back then is how constant that underlying question has remained.

Because for all the sophistication of the tools available to us today, the organizations that get things right are the ones still asking the same thing first: does it work for the person who uses it? Not the person who commissioned it. Not the person who controls the budget. The person at the other end of the process, the one who hasn’t joined yet, the one who just needs to find something quickly and get back to work.

How AI has impacted intranet design and user experience

AI is a powerful example of this. Implemented well, with that foundational question at the center, it can be transformative, particularly for the people who’ve always been hardest to reach. Implemented to solve the wrong challenge, or purely as an organizational flex, it’s just amplifies the same problem.

That is what this series is about. Not specifically the technology, although I’ll talk about that as well. It’s about what two decades of working with organizations across the world has taught me about what actually works, what consistently doesn’t, and why the most important person in your intranet, your digital workplace, your comms strategy (whatever you want to call it) is still the one who hasn’t walked through the door yet.

I hope you’ll follow along with me.