January 2014
With employees working from several locations besides the Nottingham head office, and inboxes becoming cluttered with internal communications rather than faciliting customer conversations, a drastic redesign of the Halsbury Intranet was proposed. Aimed at enabling fast-paced, informal exchanges, the redesigned and reinvigorated tool made the most of the acronym and was dubbed Hi.
Hi's main screen is a message board whose design took cues from various social media platforms, leveraging their established interaction patterns to swiftly reclaim a sense of community across diverging departments.
Focussing on the ephemerality of the news shared, the message board updates and rearranges in real-time thanks to Terry Wingfield's in-depth work with SignalR and Masonry. Using photos also featured on the 'Meet the team' section of the Halsbury Travel website, Hi combines elements of the professional and social sides of Halsbury.
Above:
Hi even features its own 'like' - the Hi5.
Hi also boasts a database of contact details for all the company's employees, a tool for booking paid leave, a file-sharing system for commonly-used digital resources and access to the company's many admin systems and websites.
Hoping for a genuine shift in the way the company operated, we initiated an internal marketing campaign and hosted a full-on launch day that incorporated an introduction to Hi, a short tutorial, and even themed cake.
Above:
The Halsbury Marketing team on Hi launch day.
