UX research and design to transform Vaillant’s traditional top-down intranet into a modern social collaboration platform that empowers employees, accelerates onboarding, and fosters knowledge sharing.
Vaillant, a leading heating technology company, recognised that their existing intranet had become a bottleneck rather than an enabler. Built primarily for top-down communication, it offered minimal collaboration tools and limited self-service capabilities — inadequate for a modern, distributed workforce that expects consumer-grade digital experiences.
As Senior UX Designer, I helped reimagine the intranet as a social collaboration platform that would bridge generational gaps, accelerate new employee onboarding, and fundamentally shift organisational culture from passive information consumption to active knowledge sharing.
Transform a traditional intranet in one leap — skipping the incremental evolution most companies follow.
We needed to simultaneously introduce social features and shift employee mindsets toward self-service and collaboration, without alienating long-term employees accustomed to the old system.
Most organisations evolve their intranets gradually: static content → basic search → limited collaboration → social features. Vaillant wanted to compress this journey, moving from a traditional top-down system directly to a state-of-the-art social intranet.
Nearly three decades of intranet evolution — compressed into one project.
While consumer social media platforms face declining trust and engagement, internal social intranets are gaining traction. Employees crave connection and knowledge sharing in safe, professional environments — but only if the tools feel intuitive and culturally endorsed.
The risk: introducing “social” features that employees perceive as forced corporate surveillance rather than genuine collaboration enablers.
This wasn’t just a UX project — it was organisational change management disguised as software design. We needed to:
Discover how the current intranet either enables or blocks productivity across different user groups and roles.
Identify popular intranet content and features that resonate with employees and should be preserved or enhanced in the new system.
Test whether both new hires (digital natives) and long-term employees (change-resistant) embrace the social intranet concept.
Create a concept that genuinely promotes collaboration, networking and information exchange — not just adds “social” as a superficial feature.
Develop an interactive prototype demonstrating core social features and validate it through testing with real employees.
Decrease internal helpdesk and HR support requests by empowering employee self-service capabilities.
Increase innovative output through enhanced collaboration tools and cross-functional knowledge exchange.
Reduce communication overhead through streamlined information flow and easier discovery of employee expertise and skills.
We structured a rapid four-week research and design sprint that balanced depth of understanding with speed of delivery.
Collaborated with stakeholders to map all relevant user groups and define focus groups based on intranet relevance to their work. Conducted in-depth interviews with representatives from each group, collecting user goals and pain points.
Created empathy maps to deeply understand each focus group’s perspective and needs.
Synthesised research into problem statements and design hypotheses. Developed employee personas representing the spectrum from new hires to long-term employees.
Formulated clear problem statements to sharpen project scope and align team understanding.
Ideated improvements along the new-employee journey and defined the main use cases. Designed user flows structurally in mockups with brand design, to avoid confusion for long-term employees during testing.
Built a Figma prototype and conducted usability tests with the focus user groups.
We began by auditing the existing intranet’s structure, features, tools and content, and identified user roles within the system. This baseline understanding revealed what employees valued and where frustration concentrated.
Need: daily operational information, collaboration tools, project resources.
Behaviour: power users, frustrated by inefficiencies, demand advanced features.
Need: onboarding guidance, quick ramp-up, discovering colleagues and resources.
Behaviour: digital-native, expects modern UX, overwhelmed by information.
Need: publishing tools, engagement analytics, content governance.
Behaviour: concerned about message control, need easy content management.
Need: familiarity, minimal disruption, clear value of changes.
Behaviour: change-resistant, attached to existing workflows, sceptical of “social” features.
In the first workshop round, participants wrote their needs as user stories and then voted on them. The 40-plus stories sorted into five clusters — and the vote distribution told us, before a single screen was drawn, that this was not primarily a “make it social” problem. Access and findability carried the most weight.
Enable a user to access the Vaillant Group system landscape — content, tools, systems.
Enable a user to explore and find content, and to customise the way they receive the result.
Enable a user to publish information in the right channel to reach the relevant audience.
Enable a user to find, connect and collaborate with other people within the Vaillant Group.
Provide information and tools to guide, help and support users in the digital ecosystem.
“I need a flexible and powerful search across the systems I have access to, to quickly get the right, unique, most current content in a structured way — and thus save time and reduce frustration.”
“I would wish to have only ONE hub for collaboration instead of using Teams, Chatter, Confluence, Slack and SharePoint — to reduce effort spent searching and to create critical mass on one social tool.”
“I need a clear and simplified navigation structure, to see what is available and to navigate faster and more intuitively.”
“I need to access content, tools and processes that live outside the Group Net in one place, to be able to work more effectively.”
“As an employee I need to personalise my homepage based on my daily working style, to focus on the content that is relevant to me.”
“I need a recommendation on which tool to use for what in the system landscape, to be able to work efficiently — to avoid parallel worlds.”
“I need a highly available Group Net, so that I can reach important work-related tools at any time.”
“As a publisher I want one tool in a central hub for group-wide communication, with clear guidance — avoiding multiple isolated, overlapping tools.”
“I wish to create, publish and maintain content and landing pages quickly for different functional areas, in a directly visible edit mode.”
“I want to be supported in networking — to get to know new colleagues who might be relevant for my job, and to grow stronger together as the Vaillant family.”
How this shaped the work: the top of the list is almost entirely about finding and reaching things — search, navigation, one place for tools, one hub for collaboration. That is what turned “search as foundation” and “network value” into the leading design hypotheses, and it is why the concept invested in information architecture before it invested in social features.
Rather than creating “average user” personas, I developed two polarising archetypes representing the extremes of our user spectrum — ensuring our design solution worked for both ends and everyone in between.
52-year-old department manager with 25 years at Vaillant. Achim knows where everything is in the current intranet and fears “social” features will create noise and distraction. He’s sceptical that younger employees’ preferences should dictate tools affecting his productivity.
27-year-old engineer joining Vaillant fresh from university. Nina expects consumer-grade digital experiences and is overwhelmed by traditional corporate systems. She needs to quickly find people, understand organisational structure, and access onboarding materials without asking colleagues basic questions.
Design implication: the intranet needed progressive disclosure — appearing simple and non-threatening to Achim while offering the advanced social and collaboration features Nina expects. Onboarding would be crucial not just for new employees, but for existing employees learning the new system.
In collaborative workshops, we mapped the “ideal world” employee experience and identified opportunities to introduce social intranet features at each stage.
Key insight: the most critical intervention point is the first days of employment. New employees who successfully navigate onboarding via the intranet become advocates for the platform, while those who struggle resort to emailing colleagues and avoiding the system entirely.
Based on research and stakeholder alignment, I formulated four core hypotheses that guided our design decisions.
An employee can work efficiently if they find needed information quickly. Therefore a prominently designed, intelligent text-based search is a valuable key functionality that must be immediately accessible and highly accurate.
An employee is as valuable to the company as they are networked. Therefore smart people-search through skills and locations creates organisational value by connecting expertise with needs.
The first days as a new employee are key for long-term relationships. Therefore the onboarding process must be as simple and smart as possible, establishing the intranet as the go-to resource from day one.
The ability to easily exchange ideas with others and react to people’s posts is an enabling function. Therefore social interactions should be designed as easy and usable as possible, removing barriers to engagement.
User goals were analysed as task flows, designed as wireflows, and prototyped with optimised user flows. We iterated with the team and client before testing with Vaillant employees.
Rationale for testing on branded mockups: Achim, our long-term employee persona, is already sceptical of change. Testing with grey-box wireframes would create additional cognitive load interpreting “what this will actually look like”, potentially biasing feedback. Brand-consistent mockups let participants focus on functionality and information architecture rather than visual design speculation.
News feed, smart communities, team pages, filtered groups, article view and the people network — all in Vaillant’s brand design so participants judged function, not visuals.
Divided into three topic blocks, each containing around three tasks. After each block, in-depth open questions gathered qualitative insights beyond task-completion metrics.
Each scenario tested critical hypotheses: is search intuitive? Do people discover colleagues naturally? Does collaboration feel forced or organic?
All participants successfully found information and people using search. The unified search bar became the primary navigation method, validating our “search as foundation” hypothesis.
New employees embraced discussion forums immediately, but long-term employees needed explicit permission and examples to understand “when to post vs. email”.
Finding colleagues by skills generated “aha moments” — participants immediately saw value in discovering expertise they didn’t know existed in the organisation.
New-employee participants felt “relieved” seeing a clear onboarding checklist and progress tracking, reducing the overwhelm of starting a new job.