Help new users to get to know the functionality of the platform better. How can one encourage users to be more active without annoying them? The easiest way is to interest them with a reward. So we decided to help people fill in their profile information with a custom widget that would show them their progress and thank them for their activity every time they entered the community. This was a win-win situation for users and community managers. The users got the gamification-styled functionality plus an easier way to find the needed user in the community. Community managers got an employee directory, basic information about users of their community, improved functionality of the platform (because many features work when the profile fields are filled), as well as more accurate and true analytics for all types of community users.
KIC InnoEnergy is a company that focuses on innovations and alternative energy projects. The company has various projects for education, innovations, and business in different countries. Why is it a unique case? Because it is an external community for an international company with very different types of user roles.
Project goals
- Provide full communication opportunities within one platform to the broad community of KIC, including employees and clients
- Use as much out-of-the-box functionality of the platform as we could
- Make an excellent basis for interactions in different languages and locations
- Make the scholarship application procedure easy and fast for all participants in the process
- Develop an easy-to-understand communication hub for all company employees, partners, and clients
Our solution
Make intranet a massive and advanced news platform to make it alive and interesting for every user. How? We made the news page a new homepage. Various company news became the first people saw after logging in. We developed a package of customizations to help people get the best from the news. Every user was able to customize their news feed based on their different interests. Key places navigation also became available on the news page so that a user would not have to roam the community searching for the needed group.
Help company to spend less time, hence, money on hiring people. The best solution is to customize functionality specifically for the company. We made a custom tile with the international vacancies database. It allows users to search for the best vacancy options, apply for the vacancy, create, and modify vacancies. All the options are available in one place.
Encourage people to use the platform by making it more interactive and user-friendly. We took the main points of users’ interaction with the intranet and customized them to fit the easy-to-go philosophy of the company’s digital workplace.
Provide a unique solution for the scholarship programs. We worked on a bunch of optimizations for the scholarship projects groups to make them easier and faster to process on all levels of communication, both for the managers and applicants. The main idea was to make the application for a scholarship faster and available in one space for all locations.
Customizations
Profile completeness tile to encourage users to get to know platform functionality and let them use the functionality of the platform in a more advanced way. Tile can be set up for different profile fields and display different encouraging phrases based on the percentage of completeness. Plus it looks nice when you have the widget on the homepage just for you 🙂
Blog tile with a set of different views and advanced settings for the news feed, so the group admin can set up the news feed specifically for the group. Tile can display the content from the chosen groups, display particular types of content, etc.
Slider tile with the key spaces navigation buttons that just makes the homepage look nicer and helps users to get to the needed groups. This is pretty common customization but every time it is something unique.
Vacancies tile is advanced custom development for hiring purposes. Tile allows admins to create and manage vacancies using settings functionality. Any other user can search for the vacancies and apply using this functionality. The main idea is to provide users with all the needed information on the hiring process within one page.
For this community, the news page is in the center of the community – the homepage was all about the news. The interest-based widget that provides the ability to see content items that match the interest the users have selected for themselves. It helps users to have a personalized news feed on the homepage. So the community feels like a truly personal digital workplace 🙂
