Boehringer Ingelheim, a global leader with over 53,000 employees, undertook a major initiative to rebrand and enhance its internal digital tools. The goal was to improve efficiency, foster connections across global teams, and deliver greater value to employees.
As a UX Consultant, I played a pivotal role in this transformation, focusing on personalisation, customisation, and user-centric design to create a more engaging and efficient digital workspace for employees.
Boehringer Ingelheim’s new brand created the opportunity to redesign and enhance the global intranet, with a focus on user intent, usability, and measurable value
THE CHALLENGES
Exploring User Needs and Delivering Tangible Value
Exploring User Needs and Delivering Tangible Value
- Aligning internal tools with the newly updated company brand while ensuring they continued to meet employees' needs.
- Creating a more efficient, personalised experience that would encourage employee engagement and ease of use.
- Developing a community-driven system for managing and delivering high-quality content.
THE APPROACH & SOLUTIONS
1. Rebranding for Alignment and Value
1. Rebranding for Alignment and Value
As part of Boehringer Ingelheim’s global rebrand, I led the UX direction for the redesign of the company’s intranet. This included introducing a streamlined information architecture and multilingual support, ensuring internal tools aligned with the refreshed global brand while remaining intuitive and scalable. My focus was on improving usability, enhancing accessibility, and ensuring the tools were easy to navigate, which ultimately reinforced the company’s new visual identity.
2. Personalisation and Customisation
A key part of the project was enabling employees to personalise their digital workspace. By incorporating audience targeting, I designed a homepage that adapted to each user’s role, location, and preferences. This approach made the tools feel more tailored, providing a seamless and engaging experience. I also included micro-interactions like personalised greetings and displaying each users daily canteen menu to make the experience more enjoyable and human-centred.
A micro-UX example of a personalised greeting message shown when a user logs into their dashboard. This small touch helped to reinforce the sense of a customised and user-centred experience.
3. Building a User Pool for Research and Testing
To ensure the changes resonated with employees, I built a user pool of over 400 employees who were willing to provide feedback and help us test new features. We employed a combination of questionnaires, interviews, and user testing to validate our designs, enabling us to iterate quickly and ensure the tools met the real-world needs of the employees. My strategic leadership in user research was key to ensuring that solutions were not only intuitive but also meaningful at scale.
Recruiting and creating a user pool of willing volunteers enabled us to test early design iterations, iterate quickly, and deliver value more efficiently. Volunteer activities ranged from quick polls and surveys to longer diary studies and user testing
4. Editor Community Empowerment
A central component to the success of the digital workspace was building a thriving community of over 2,000 editors responsible for managing content across the platform. I designed modular UX systems to support decentralised content creation, enhancing consistency, accessibility, and efficiency. I provided ongoing support through presentations, Q&A sessions, templates, guidelines, and a dedicated Teams channel. This empowered editors to create high-quality, user-centred content, ensuring the intranet remained relevant, useful, and accessible to employees worldwide.
Ensuring a successful digital workplace can never be achieved by one person alone. At a global organisation like Boehringer Ingelheim, it requires many people to understand the importance of UX principles. By building a community of empowered editors, I was able to help ensure that the digital workplace delivered high-quality, user-centred content.
5. Data-Driven Decisions
Analytics and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) were central to shaping the direction of the digital tools at Boehringer Ingelheim. Every six months, I set clear, targeted OKRs that allowed us to hone in on specific areas for improvement and drive meaningful change. This strategic approach enabled us to focus efforts, optimise performance, and measure success in a structured way.
Results from these OKRs included:
Customisation: Increased tool and app customisation by 12%, encouraging employees to personalise their digital workspace by selecting their most useful tools and apps.
Accessibility: Enhanced accessibility features to 94%, adhering to WCAG guidelines. This included improvements to content hierarchy, image alt text, colour contrast, misconfigured web parts, and extensions—ensuring inclusivity for all employees.
Efficiency: Achieved a 30% reduction in time on task and a 25% increase in task completion rates for key user journeys within INSITE, improving productivity and user satisfaction.
Content Quality: Reduced the number of broken links across the digital workplace by 9.14% by implementing a link-checking workflow to notify editors of outdated or broken links on their pages.
By concentrating on these key areas, we were able to deliver measurable improvements in user engagement, satisfaction, and overall platform performance. The strategic focus and iterative enhancements led to INSITE, Boehringer Ingelheim’s intranet, being recognised as the largest and most engaging intranet in the Swoop Analytics 2025 SharePoint Intranet Benchmarking Report.
THE RESULTS
Measurable Impact and Industry Recognition
Measurable Impact and Industry Recognition
Enhanced User Engagement: The personalisation features significantly boosted employee engagement by providing a tailored, user-first experience.
Empowered Content Creators: By investing in editor education and community-building, we ensured the creation of high-quality, relevant content, which drove greater user satisfaction.
Industry Recognition: INSITE was recognised as the top intranet in the Swoop Analytics 2025 benchmarking report, affirming the success of our efforts in improving usability and engagement.
Our UX work on personalising the intranet — ensuring employees felt valued and had access to the right tools, content, and information for their roles — was recognised in the SWOOP Analytics 2025 SharePoint Intranet Benchmarking Report as a leading example of intranet design
If you're doing exciting things and need help with anything user experience related, I'd love to talk.