Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Ken Woodwoth, Kelsey Boyd, Jake Douma, Michaela Lederman
Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is a global nonprofit that addresses environmental challenges at the intersection of science, economic incentives, and advocacy.
Synced with a global brand update, EDF wanted to reinvent the employee intranet to be more engaging, personalized, and inclusive. After identifying users’ goals and workflows, Aten delivered a mobile-friendly intranet built on Drupal 10 and hosted on Platform.sh.
The reimagined EDF Insider features a homepage brimming with handpicked internal updates, global environmental news, highlights the staff doing the work, includes an enhanced directory, browsable and searchable content hubs, and an updated look and feel that aligns to EDF’s external websites.
Case study images use placeholder text to protect internal information.
Engaging a Global Workforce
To help both EDF stakeholders and Aten’s team better understand the needs of EDF’s distributed employee base, Aten devised a series of discovery tactics comprising staff surveys, a content audit, and user journey workshops with employees from across regions and divisions. Insights regarding employees’ intranet use, preferences, and pain points helped guide the redesign and satisfy both organizational and employee objectives.
Back to topIntuitive Organization and Browsing
Browsing and discovering the most up-to-date resources across the organization was a pain point for employees. Given the lack of clear categorization of content, the site required that users know exactly what documents they needed in order to find and access the information.
Aten crafted a homepage that acts as a virtual water cooler, showcasing dynamically featured content from across the organization including events, company news, program updates, and staff. From here, users can dive into content hubs where editors across departments have the ability to edit and user-friendly page layouts to showcase the most recent resources.
Back to topPersonalized Listings and Convenient Contact Methods
The employee directory is one of the most popular tools on the site, so ensuring it was expanded and allowed for further personalization was critical to all users. In order to balance the ability to automatically add new employees while being able to personalize the experience, the Aten team created a new content type for staff members.
The directory now offers space for staff to add personal stories and images, phonetic name pronunciations, customize time zones for remote employees, and more. Workday integrations add insights regarding each employee’s place within the org chart, and Drupal Slack and Teams API integrations provide easy and immediate ways to contact colleagues.
Back to topA Design to Match the New Brand
The intranet had been in operation for nearly a decade and was ripe for a full renovation.
The updated Insider leverages EDF’s new brand, and specifically uses iconography and bold colors to create an experience that’s clean, fresh and synced with EDF.org. The new design’s icon system adds clarity to the interface and provides visual elements where photography isn’t available. The bold blue and green colors of the new EDF brand can be seen throughout Insider, making it clear that this is an extension of the brand.
Designers supplemented minimal media resources with iconography, strong use of colors, employee headshots, and graphic text to transition from the site’s previously text-heavy motif to a more humanized and dynamic design.
Back to topMoving from a Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 platform—and employing Aten's Mercury Editor tool—the redesign features a component-based framework that allows for easy and flexible authoring capabilities. The framework also ensures that user screen size determines the components displayed, which means staff can easily access the intranet via desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. This empowers staff to interact with colleagues and stay up-to-date on the go, which was important for EDF’s global workforce.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Mercury Editor is the drag-and-drop Drupal publishing module built by Aten Design Group. It makes for simple, visual editing for non-technical web managers and content editors.
