Building a Digital Workplace With Legal Aid Alberta

How we helped LAA continue to deliver affordable legal services to disadvantaged Albertans.

CLIENT

PLATFORMS

Microsoft 365, SharePoint, and Teams

SERVICES

Intranet and Employee Portal Development

About the client

The Legal Aid Society of Alberta (LAA) is a not-for-profit organization that provides affordable legal services in family law, domestic violence, child welfare, immigration, and youth and adult criminal defense.

LAA’s mission is to provide legal services and expertise to individual Albertans and the legal community to support fairness in the justice system.

Visit Legal Aid Alberta’s website

Project overview

LAA required the redevelopment of its intranet site, ‘The Loop’, in a way that the Communications and Human Resources teams could manage changes and build on it for years to come. The redevelopment needed to be integrated with Microsoft 365 to leverage SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, and Azure Active Directory. It had to have an easy-to-use interface and content management functionality that would allow quick updates of content with no need for custom coding.

Problem Statement

When Punchcard and LAA began our partnership for this project, the current iteration of ‘The Loop’ was onerous to update and difficult to navigate. Internal LAA employees felt both overwhelmed and confused when trying to find information relevant to their roles and business functions.

The outcome

Eliminated duplication of content by connecting with the public facing website.
Improved site navigation using a hub intranet model.
Internal champions trained to manage content for business units.
Reduced time spent updating content due to improved approval workflows.
Consistent internal branding.
Enhanced internal communication and collaboration.

From left to right: two women facing each other and chatting in an office environment. Two women talking to each other while one woman is taking notes in an office.

The Punchcard team was with us every step of the way for our intranet redesign. We are grateful for their insights, expertise, and guidance throughout the project. Our team members LOVE their new Loop!”

Samantha Busby, Communications Coordinator

The approach

User interviews

Understand the users. Get facts, not assumptions.
Empathy maps

Define user needs by focusing on what they say, think, do, and feel.
Personas

User personas to define the target user and keep them top of mind.
Iterate, iterate, iterate

Create wireframes to visualize an initial site layout and gather user feedback.

Early design iterations

Four screenshots of wireframes for Legal Aid Alberta’s SharePoint. From left to right: the home page, an about the organization page, the latest news roll-up page, and an employee centre page.

Project by the numbers

modern intranet

department publishing sites

collaboration sites

trained internal champions

300+

users

100+

SharePoint pages

The solution

We proposed a redevelopment of ‘The Loop’ that leveraged all the current Microsoft 365 technologies and organized the content in a way that met the needs of the individual users and distinct LAA business units. Additionally, a new governance plan was implemented where each business unit was assigned a champion who was trained to add and edit content on their section of the intranet, thereby reducing the workload for the Communications and Human Resources staff.