National Emergency Management Agency
Equipping NEMA staff to better support resilience-building in disaster-impacted communities
The National Recovery and Resilience Agency (NRRA) asked us to co-design an intranet that would enable geographically-distributed staff in diverse roles to operate more cohesively and confidently.
Outcomes
A comprehensive insights report which captures NRRA staff needs and provides context for our design decisions
Core design principles to guide the NRRA with future design and development decisions
A robust technical review and recommendations for the future intranet platform to support the NRRA with efficient and effective implementation and investment
Implementation-ready high-fidelity prototypes and handover documentation to support a useful, usable and attractive staff intranet experience
Sectors
A new intranet for a new agency
The National Recovery and Resilience Agency (NRRA) – now merged into the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) – was established in 2021 to support disaster recovery and resilience in Australian communities. As the agency grew quickly in size against a backdrop of national disasters, it became clear that NRRA staff needed a dedicated, internal organisational online portal to allow them to quickly and easily access the information needed to carry out their work and serve their communities better.
Collaborating directly with staff
We worked closely with a core design group of 25 employees selected to reflect a meaningful range of perspectives across NRRA departments. We understood that any successful outcome would need to respond to the perspectives of both office and field-based NRRA staff, working across Australian regions, situations and timezones.
Across a series of 20 workshops—designed to create an open space for discussion, critique and bright ideas—we created a set of six core principles to guide our design efforts, and prototyped concepts for the future intranet to validate with further NRRA staff.
We started with a proposed information architecture and progressed our concepts and designs through to high fidelity prototypes illustrating how the future intranet would look and feel. We engaged with a diverse range of employees throughout this process, testing and iterating our design along the way to improve on its fitness for purpose and intuitivity.
We created an interactive prototype and tested it with NRRA staff, making adjustments to the design in direct response to their feedback.
Building on the right foundations
Selecting the right digital platform for the future intranet was a key component of this project. We carried out a detailed technical review of candidate intranet platforms in order to deliver a confident recommendation and rationale for how the NRRA could implement the intranet design as close to intent as possible, without unrealistic costs and feasibility.
The intranet was designed with mobile in mind, to ensure the remote NRRA workforce could access the information they need for their work anywhere, at any time.
The intranet was designed with mobile in mind, to ensure the remote NRRA workforce could access the information they need for their work anywhere, at any time.
A flexible design, ready to build
We delivered a flexible, interactive design which can adapt to the changing needs of the agency and grow over time as its information content and needs shift. To ensure a smooth transition to the build phase, we created a bespoke design system and detailed handover documentation, and delivered a comprehensive insights report that captures all the findings from our user research with NRRA staff.
A selection of the intranet design system that formed the foundation of the site
