Enhancing User Experience: Personalising Service’s Australia’s Intranet
Services Australia
APAC| SharePoint Intranet Festival 2025
Discover how Services Australia, an Australian government agency that delivers social and health-related services and supports 33,500 employees through Medicare, Social Security, and Child Support, is redesigning its SharePoint intranet with targeted content and personalisation to better serve its workforce.
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I would like to warmly welcome our first speakers of the day. First up, we have Jillian and Michael from Services Australia. Jillian is the director of the executive and internal communications team and Michael is the assistant director of the intranet team, and they'll be sharing a bit of the inside scoop on a product on a project that's currently underway to recast their homepage with targeting and personalisation with the overall goal to make the intranet much more UX centred.
And I love this story because it's still currently unfolding, but the team already has some fantastic insights to share. So please do make Jillian and Michael feel super welcome and I'll hand over to you. Thanks, Emily.
Let me just share screen so that I've given you the right presentation. Here we go. That should be coming up very shortly.
Looks good. Thanks. Excellent.
Thank you. So thank you, Emily, for that introduction. As Emily said, Michael and I look after the intranet.
We've got a team, obviously, that do that with us. Michael has worked for Services Australia for 25 years and he's seen through four intranet changes. So I rely completely on him for his knowledge of the intranet.
And to that I bring internal comms experience and we are also modernising the structures of our internal communication network at the same time as we are doing this intranet project. I understand some of you are from overseas. So maybe just a little bit about our agency for context.
So Services Australia is the Australian government agency responsible for MyGov, which is an online application Australians can use to get benefits and services from the government. Medicare, which is our health system. Centrelink, which is our social services system and child support services and payments.
When people talk about going down to Centrelink, they're talking about us. When you swipe your Medicare card, if you go to the doctor and you're Australian, your refund comes from us. And when your doctor writes a prescription on a prescription pad to give you medication, that official pad actually gets sent out from us.
And in fact, it comes from communications division because we have the printing team in our remit. Here's a bit of a glance of what we do by numbers. There it is.
So we host about 10 million customer contacts every week, face to face or digitally and in phone calls. And we have service centres all around Australia and the largest call centre in the Southern Hemisphere. Whoops, sorry, that's not what I went to do.
Get on the right page. So more and more our customers are accessing their services online. And day by day, as you can see, our throughput is enormous, larger than any Australian bank.
In fact, larger than Australian banking all combined. And when we talk about customers, we talk about helping Australians to get on with their lives. And when we think about our staff, we think of helping them to get on with their jobs as they serve Australians.
Which brings me to the intranet. So on our intranet, along with the agency's service operations manual, our intranet, along with the agency's operations manual, which is called Operational Blueprint, is the main source of truth for staff. It's an M365 SharePoint site and was previously a 2016 SharePoint site.
And we manage about 2,500 pages. And there are 16 members managing the governance, the publishing and the publishing network of some 300 distributed publishers. So as you can imagine, it's a very busy job.
We last redesigned the intranet when we moved to M365 in 2022. We weren't able to implement targeting or personalization at that time. And as you can see, this is the homepage of our current intranet.
At the top are the standard Microsoft bars with our hub links, search types, and then the menu with our dropdowns. It then gets very practical very quickly. 20,000 plus of our staff are serving Australians all day, every day.
So the boxed links you see there are the tools and resources most used in the organization and used mostly by service delivery staff. Our featured news just peaks above the page fold. And then the huddle on the right there is our corporate notices.
As I said, so below the folder, there are reminders and events and the capacity for staff to add their own links. And the usual footer is at the bottom. It's neat.
It's simple. And staff are used to it, so why change it? So we believe that our intranet should reflect the agency's goal to be a world leader in government service delivery. However, research and feedback has shown us that elements need improving to help staff progress.
So communications research last year showed us that there are system wide challenges with our internal communication system, including duplication of information and information overload. And as a result, staff are telling us that they're overwhelmed with information from a variety of sources. We want the intranet to be the main source of truth.
But it competes with the other business teams. So the other business teams have been spinning up SharePoint sites because they can. And they also have locally collated newsletters.
They use Viva Engage extensively. And of course, there are other resources that they use as well. The layout of the intranet is good.
But in its current state, it can't help us solve the system and information overload challenges. And we have to work on servicing the information that staff feel that they aren't getting enough of. So we formed the hypothesis that the intranet homepage can help us address these challenges.
And we're confident we can build something that will be so useful, it will stop the perceived need for local curation of information. Now, we are now able to technically personalise parts of the homepage and apply targeting to news. I know we're a little bit behind the eight ball, but we're getting there.
And we're going to provide a facility for our business areas to be able to publish to the homepage and target their people. And with national targeted news and corporate notices, we'll be able to reduce duplicated and cascaded emails. We can provide a system which people can personalise to do their own job roles so they can easily do their job by launching the intranet homepage.
I confess we hope to be further down the track and be able to show you the finished product of our grand intranet redesign. So today's presentation is not we had this sad old thing and now here's our amazing new thing. Ta-da type presentation.
That's not where we're at. However, the reasons we aren't able to show you a finalised product are just as instructive and likely actually more useful. So Michael will take you through the process and how we've gone with pilot testing.
We'll go through the instructive challenges and constraints and I'll outline further steps, our future wishes and take some takeaways in summary. And I'm going to hand over to Michael. All right.
Thank you, Jillian. Again, welcome everyone. With the refresh, we aren't rushing headlong to the solutions we think will work.
We have a carefully mapped out project with a project charter, design principles and a clear idea of what we want the end result to do. Most of you will recognise this as project good practice 101. So our project charter gives us our north star for what we're trying to achieve.
And as it says here, the homepage should connect staff with the information relevant to their job role. It should be set up in such a way that we can keep staff informed about what's happening so they can do their jobs well. And it should be tailored so people get what they need and don't have to sift out what they don't.
It should be driven by user needs, not information provision needs. As an Australian government agency, we have different guardrails to our private industry partners. As we redesign the homepage, we need to take into account a number of set parameters.
The web content accessibility guidelines, which we all know as WCAG version 2.0 and soon the 2.5 guidance. So our page must be accessible, which may restrict our design parameters. The digital services standard set by the Australian Government's Digital Transformation Agency.
We have legislative obligations to privacy principles and data collection. So for an agency that holds personal information about most Australians, we also apply cyber rules principles. If something is not secure, we can't use it.
So for example, Microsoft 365 apps developed by private companies. In addition to the government obligations, there's also Australian public service standards. The Australian Public Service Experience Design Principles, which are also the principles of the Services Australia Customer 360 Experience Standard, are a must-do for us.
Here, you can see the design principles translated into our project charter, TrueNorth. Simple, so content is searchable and scannable. Inclusive, so it's personalised, accessible to everyone, sorry.
Tailored, so it's personalised and intuitive. Connected, so we put staff as our users at the centre of our solutions. Connected.
Transparent, which is decisions which are evidence-based in line with research findings. Safe and trustworthy. Helpfully, the Digital Transformation Agency has outlined the service design and delivery process government departments must follow when rolling out a product for our customers and the Australian Public Service staff.
So we're following their guide. A discovery stage, where you explore the problem. An alpha stage, when you test concepts and hypotheses.
A beta stage, so the build and test stage leading to launch. And the live stage, how you support and improve the service into the future. We've already spoken about our discovery, so we'll move on to alpha.
So this is fresh in our minds as we've only just finished the alpha testing. In alpha, we've tested a number of concepts we thought might help staff. In our testing groups, we used the standard Q&A system, tested a neutral approach and asked staff what they use now, what they could see on the examples that were useful to them, and how they might imagine using those features.
Separately, we also tested usability one-on-one with staff. To do all this, we had to have an initial go at a couple of designs and build them in a development site. So you can see here that we gave our tech crew the design specs we were looking for.
And this is one of the designs we asked them to build as an example. We also started to think of it from the point of view of our service delivery staff. They often have multiple programs open to serve customers, and we noticed they reduced the intranet to fit a number of programs on their screen.
So through the middle here, you can see we tested it in different size formats to see how the elements stack and appear and the content order. We also designed a couple of different concepts for particular elements to test these with staff. And here you can see two of them.
One has the find support links under an expandable page section. The other doesn't. One has the main About Me icons across the page.
The other has a different test title and is arranged in a box form. We tested the updated news section. This will be targeted to particular users.
So you can see we use active language and have split the news into the actions that people need to take. Either do it or know it. During the testing, we needed to explain to users that this will be targeted and personalized to them.
And we'll move on. This is the other part of the news. Yes, we can see it.
And the change here is the addition over to the right there of the local updates. Now, this is a big one and a first for our agency. So for us to make this happen offline, we needed to develop a facility for business teams to be able to independently publish to the intranet homepage.
We've also tested other things we haven't had before to see how they resonate with our users. Here you can see us testing different banner types and elements. We're also asking what staff might like to see in an agency trends section.
The alerts are our IT outage notifications. They're very big for our agency, which staff across the country use daily. So bringing them to the homepage is proving popular.
But we've still got a lot of work to do to make sure that we can make them possible. The only personalized element of our current intranet homepage is the capacity to add your own links as a list of favorites. So this is well used and is a must have to retain for the new homepage.
So we've also flicked over. So the last thing we tested is a variation of the favorites. So our agency is huge.
The resource is extensive and the job roles so diverse. So it's very difficult to design an intranet that meets the needs of everyone. Popular links are dominated by service delivery staff clicks as the biggest cohort of staff.
But this leaves other business areas enabling staff, particularly those in IT, with no visible reflection of themselves on the intranet. So to solve this, we borrowed an idea of the toolkit from a presentation we saw at the Step 2 conference last year. So that is the ability to provide the links you might need in your particular job role.
And for the user to select them to personalize their own homepage for what they use most often or need. So as you can see, you select a link, it goes blue. There's a counter up in the top left hand corner there to show the user that they are coming close to the 20 link limit that we've put on.
And there are also previews. So that allows the user to be able to preview a link before they decide to add it. And in the top right corner, that's how a toolkit link then appears on the homepage.
To the feedback. So what did we garnish from all of this? So feedback so far has been confusing, extraordinary, frank, but immensely useful. There's different feedback that we receive per cohort, but we understand that service delivery staff need preferential treatment so they can serve our customers.
You can see here the feedback on the homepage. There were many discussions about where different elements should be on the homepage with no clear consensus. Ultimately, the focus groups found that the intranet homepage will meet the needs of staff so long as they can easily find the links they need every day.
Easily see what's changed or what's new that affects them and have clear cues to get them to the part of the page that they need. News and corporate updates were regarded by staff as less important. Staff wanted the reminders and events and the local news or updates placed above the featured national news.
They loved the introduction of local updates, but we had some variation on what they thought could be in them. We currently also have some technical limitations as into how far we can go for them with this feature. They liked the split of the corporate news, but the example we provide them made them worried as in their views, there's too much news.
But in reality, with targeting, there's going to be less overall for users. Staff found the emergency and information banners at the top useful. They liked the personalized welcome message, but noted that it used up and took up a lot of space.
The toolkit was received very favorably and is good for differentiating job types. But we're going to need to win over our service delivery staff by providing some starter links and will need to communicate to our non-service delivery staff to make sure that they know to adjust the links that are pre-populated. We may also need to reposition the feature, possibly in the top left as it's used most by service delivery.
Another little test we decided to do is we didn't include a specific search for our agency operations manual, the operational blueprint. So our theory was that service delivery staff had it open and used its own search function. It's on our current homepage and not including it was a test to see if it got a reaction.
Turns out it still wanted and it's used much more than we thought. So now we are going over into the beta areas. So we're still collating the feedback to determine the agreed prototype for beta.
So we've got a meeting this Friday to pull it all together. As we move into our beta stage, we've identified some challenges. Some are communication system wide, some technical and some intranet specific.
The pull between the need for a national news channel and the just give me what I want to do my job preference for corporate news and updates is strong. For UX accessibility, we found certain backgrounds like the gray backgrounds failed color contrast testing. And there's technical constraints including staying true to our brand.
Things like fading under news is not on brand. So we'll need to work closely with our brand team to align the look and feel of our refresh moving forward. There are Microsoft constraints as well, such as the defined space in the SharePoint templates between headings and around things people talked often of wasted space, but the out-of-the-box solution may not allow us to change that.
And there's always the possibility Microsoft will update SharePoint and affect any customized coding that we've implemented to enable some of these features. We're also in the process of gathering the user-based links from all over a very large agency. So quite a colossal task there.
So what's next? So we've completed Discovery and Alpha. Next, we'll design a beta and test that with a larger cohort of users over a few weeks in June. All being well, we'll aim to launch around mid-July.
We'll be ready, but there's a lot of work for service delivery staff at the end and beginning of the financial year, and we can't drop anything into that workload. You know, we're always finding there's never quite an ideal time to do a release, but at least within our agency, we understand the peaks and troughs that impact customer service delivery. So our future work.
There are a number of things we won't get to do in this project, such as review our drop-down menus, which are in our toolbar. So these were out of scope. We're also waiting on Services Australia to endorse Copilot for use in the agency.
So this will improve searchability and surfacing of information for the intranet. At the moment, as well, we can't integrate with other agency programs and have no development budget to do so, but in hindsight, we understand that a lot of these programs are going to be evolving into other programs. So there's a lot of that timeliness about, you know, is it worth pursuing at this time if it's going to change? We still need cybersecurity permissions for an analytics tool to be able to measure the success of our efforts, which is one of our Achilles heels, unfortunately.
And longer term, we're hoping that Microsoft will introduce a better calendar app for SharePoint and the capability for dark themes, which was, you know, or dark mode, which was quite a significant feedback coming from our neurodiverse and staff with disability cohorts as well. So our lessons learnt. Of course, we never stop learning, do we? We're now reacquainted with the great diversity that characterizes our 35,000 staff.
So we know more about neurodiverse needs and how to help screen readers. We know better how we can help our service delivery colleagues serve customers. Ideally, we'd know more if we were able to sample a larger cohort and get to know and engage with more staff.
But the other things we learnt is that discovery sets you up well and it's worth investing the time up front. And three takeaways we want to leave with everyone today. Firstly, don't dream up the process.
The Digital Transformation Agency's guide is extensive and comprehensive. You don't have to be in government to use it. It's on the website and available to everyone across the globe.
Diversity is awesome. And brings up great ideas to meet user needs. The big one, and this is where we have the power.
As administrators and designers, we have that certain sort of power. Use it for the good of others. When you do that, you'll also meet the real and unspoken needs of your organization.
And that comes to the end of our presentation. We'd love to thank you.
Meet the speaker:
Jillian Harding
Director Executive Communication and Events
Michael Papacharalambous
Assistant Director,
Intranet Project
