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The client
Newable is a London-based business support organisation - part commercial, part publicly funded - helping businesses start, grow and trade internationally. Following a major restructure and rebrand (which Bravand had worked on directly), the organisation had a new name, new values and a new sense of direction. The problem was that none of it had landed internally yet.
The challenge
Newable had an intranet. Nobody used it.
The research told us exactly why: there was no reason to go there. Navigation was impenetrable, content was out of date, and employees had developed workarounds - bookmarked URLs, D: drive folders, walking over to the Finance or HR desk - that worked well enough to make the intranet feel redundant.
Meanwhile, the tools employees actually needed were scattered across Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Condeco, Cintra, Eventbrite and a DIT intranet. There was no single window onto any of it.
The brief
The goal wasn't to fix the existing intranet. It was to make the new one indispensable - the first place employees opened in the morning and the easiest route to completing as many tasks as possible throughout the day. If the intranet could earn that utility, everything else Newable wanted to achieve internally - cultural alignment, better internal comms, living the new brand values - could flow through that channel. People would already be there.
Our approach
We ran two rounds of user research labs at Newable's Aldgate office, speaking to employees across teams and functions about their experience of the current site and what they actually needed from their working day. The output was a detailed picture of friction points, workarounds and unmet needs - from an organogram nobody could navigate to a search function nobody knew existed.
From there, we mapped a new information architecture, designed the UX and UI, and built a clickable prototype that we took back to employees in a second round of labs to test and validate. The concept we landed on was a personalised hub - a "My Newable" dashboard - where each employee saw the tools, contacts, content and quick-links most relevant to their role, alongside a live homepage that gave the whole organisation a reason to come back every day: news, client wins, events, new starters, social feeds.
Bravand took the project all the way through to fully specced designs and handed over to Newable's in-house development team to build on SharePoint/Microsoft 365.
The outcome
"We chose Bravand for their UX expertise specifically - their ability to really get to grips with our organisation's internal audiences resulted in an intranet platform that took our ideas way beyond what we imagined."
Nick Wright, Marketing & Communications Director, Newable
Building something your people will actually use?
Getting internal tools adopted is as much a UX challenge as a technical one. We love working on exactly this kind of brief. Get in touch with the Bravand team:
