Designing for ultra niche audiences — a look at our behind-the-scenes projects

The big difference in creating an internal platform is audience.

Where public websites have the potential to reach millions of users, closed systems are designed for a specific set of people — an ultra niche audience with singular requirements and goals.

The challenge is in creating a system that fits naturally into an organisation’s culture, preexisting workflow and IT infrastructure — it should feel intuitive and engaging. It should be useful.

In just a few days we designed and developed a meeting planner for an international ministerial conference. The organisers wanted to ditch their cumbersome spreadsheets for a bespoke solution to schedule meetings between delegates, keep track of aides’ details and share background information on attendees. We tailored our platform around the precise requirements of our client, using Craft CMS to manage user accounts and data, but designing a custom interface to keep creation and editing schedules super-simple.

One of our larger projects has been Jicwood — the intranet for Sheppard Robson, one of the UK’s biggest architecture practices. Jicwood (pictured) includes scores of pages of technical documentation, standard forms, staff directory and seating plans for hundreds of employees at multiple locations, internal news and events, transport and weather widgets, social media feeds and resource links.

The platform is hosted internally by the practice for absolute security and syncs daily with the Active Directory for minimal user management.

Users are notified on login if pages assigned to them are about to expire.

A multifunctional sidebar aids navigation into the deeply nested technical information, houses the staff and news filters and highlights social media posts and recent news.

We have also created intranets for Derwent London and Gillespies with several more in the planning stage.

The Boundary needed a platform to share their in-progress work for quick feedback. We developed a custom portal for them (on Craft CMS again) that allows them to stack incrementally revised images on top of each other (creating a historical trail of each visualisation) — a roll of the mouse reveals past versions and each is labelled clearly with a project-phase, timestamp and artist. Staff grant their clients access to the portal with the user-management section of Craft, assigning projects to each so the client can see immediately where to go and what to review.

Clients leave comments; team members respond; time is saved.

Clients can leave comments in context, team members respond and make updates, going back to previous iterations if required; huge amounts of time is saved by having everything catalogued in one place. It is a neat and professional solution that streamlines the entire process.

In addition to these and the client projects we’re working on right now, we have developed platforms for our own benefit. An in-house CRM database allows us to keep track of hundreds of potential leads in various stages. It's lean, does nothing more than we want it to do, and saves us from the pain of a bloated off-the-shelf system (and associated monthly outlay).

Another tool of vital importance to our continued operations is the Ten4 Roulette...