RWTH Aachen is one of Germany’s most prestigious technical universities — nearly 45,000 students and 10,000 employees. The existing employee intranet had grown into a maze: hard-to-find information, weak search and no shared spaces for teams. The relaunch had to turn it into a smarter, clearer digital workspace with intuitive information architecture and personalised content.
Structure, search and content quality made everyday information difficult to locate.
The intranet ignored that different roles and departments need different tools front and centre.
Without personalisation or relevance, staff stopped treating the intranet as a daily workspace.
Work happens across many devices, but the experience was not built for that reality.
We grounded the relaunch in real evidence — a broad survey, then focus groups — before turning findings into a focused feature set and a cross-device experience. Four moves carried it from research to design.
An online questionnaire ran inside the existing intranet for about two weeks — giving us a first, broad picture of the most serious pain points and the features people actually valued.
Information, tools and services scored well — while structure, search, content quality and unclear scope became the redesign priorities.
Focus-group workshops deepened the survey findings into a concrete, detailed map of which functions to redesign and which to build on.
Focus groups turned survey signals into a concrete map of what to redesign and what to build on.
The ideation phase translated research into a feature set: profiles and people search, interactive project spaces, news streams as widgets, a filterable document archive, customizable dashboards and digitalised business processes.
We prioritised a focused, research-backed feature set over a longer wish-list — fewer features, but the ones ~10,000 staff actually needed.
Every prioritised need became a concrete interface pattern: a persistent side navigation for orientation, a personalised dashboard that surfaces what each role uses most, topic-based notifications, and a guided wizard that walks new users through setting it all up.
One coherent, responsive experience that holds up from desktop to phone — ready to scale across all 10,000 employees.
