Designing for the employees
everyone else forgot.

Enterprise internal tools are often the last to get design attention.

Intrazone is BGIS's employee homepage — the central hub linking to administrative tasks, training resources, employee health information, and team SharePoint pages. Every BGIS employee uses it. None of them had any say in how it looked or worked.

Internal tools tend to get deprioritised because they don't generate revenue directly. But they affect everyone who generates that revenue. A poorly designed employee portal creates friction every single day — for every single person who uses it.

By 2021, Intrazone was showing its age in ways that went beyond aesthetics. The site hadn't been meaningfully updated in years. New accessibility legislation and WCAG standards had raised the bar. The adoption of a new BGIS brand required a visual refresh. And the shift toward hybrid and remote work had created new demand for mobile and tablet access that the site simply didn't support.

The mandate was clear: modernise the look and feel, bring the site to WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, and make it fully responsive — without breaking the content workflows that administrators relied on to maintain it.

Three decisions that shaped the whole system.

Each design decision was driven by a specific problem from the audit and had implications across the whole design — not just the surface it addressed directly.

WCAG 2.1 AA isn't a checkbox. It's a minimum.

Accessibility compliance for internal tools is often treated as a legal formality — something to check off before launch and then forget. This project treated it as a design constraint that improved the experience for everyone, not just users with disabilities.

The existing site had multiple WCAG failures — most significantly, embedding text inside images, which made content invisible to screen readers and impossible to resize. Every failure was addressed systematically, not just the ones most likely to be audited.

What I'd do differently.

The high contrast mode was designed as a user toggle, which was the right call for enterprise environments. But in hindsight, I'd push harder to also support the prefers-contrast: more CSS media query — so users whose operating system is already set to high contrast would get the mode automatically, without needing to discover and enable it manually.

I'd also build in a more formal usability testing phase with actual employees before launch. The warm reception suggests the design was on the right track, but qualitative feedback after launch is harder to act on than structured usability findings before it.

What this reinforced.

Accessibility work teaches you to design for the edges — and when you do that well, the middle benefits too. Every fix we made for screen reader compatibility, keyboard navigation, or colour contrast made the experience better for users without those needs as well. Accessible design is just good design.

The maintainability constraint also sharpened the design. When you know a content admin — not a developer — needs to update the site every month, you stop designing for ideal conditions and start designing for the real workflow. That constraint produced a more durable result than an unconstrained design would have.