Lifespan Intranet Redesign on Drupal
Intranet redesign & enhancement on Drupal 7 CMS

With five hospitals and 1200+ departments, Lifespan's intranet is a critical web-based system for their internal resources, documentation and daily communications. Over time, disparate page creation tools and piece-meal navigation left rifts, roadblocks and rabbit holes for users on the old platform. Page design, content architecture and navigation changed with virtually every click -- making it difficult for users to find what they needed or to recall how to get there again.

Lifespan came to Rubic to design and build a new healthcare intranet. They needed a system and interface to support quick access to clinical tools and safety information. Lifespan also wanted an enterprise-class intranet solution that would empower internal web and technology teams to take control of content and build countless websites for their departments, groups and teams.

Beginning with extensive discovery and data analysis work, including data-harvesting, user interviews and iterative prototypes, we clearly documented the problems and solutions of the current intranet system. With firm goals, guidelines and best practices established, Rubic and Lifespan worked together to create an intuitive navigation system based on critical and routine tasks. Along the way, we established best practices for page design, usability and accessibility. Rubic then taught Lifespan's web team how to maintain high standards for web page development as they trained new authors and populated the new intranet with content, files, and various web-based tools.  

Built on the Drupal 7 Content Management System (CMS), the new intranet's pages and websites included event registration, file management, and access permissions controlled through close integration with their existing LDAP interface and user accounts. We also integrated Apache Solr's search tool and open source analytics tool that would perform on servers behind a firewall. 

As part of the redesign, Rubic created a phased roll-out plan minimizing the impact of replacing a corporate-wide productivity tool. After mapping several milestones, we created a plan for Lifespan to replace one section at a time allowing managed training and adoption on the new navigation and search tools. This incremental launch strategy also allowed critical sections to launch first while other tools and content were still being created.