Adopting a user-centred design approach to our internal content landscape

Content is one of the most important assets in an organisation. It shapes decisions, supports services and helps colleagues get things done. That’s why we’ve established the Content Improvement team, a digital function focused on making sure our internal content, tools and platforms are accessible and user-friendly, and meet the needs of all our colleagues.

By taking a user-centred design (UCD) approach to our internal content landscape and treating content as critical infrastructure, rather than just a communications tool, we’re supporting our digital strategy objective to enhance operational excellence and drive organisational efficiency, helping our department deliver better outcomes.

In this blog post I share what we are doing and why we are doing it.

Internal content as critical infrastructure

Earlier this year, after the redesign of our department intranet, I partnered with a user researcher colleague on a discovery to better understand our department’s wider internal content landscape. This included content held across internal platforms such as SharePoint, ServiceNow, Teams and Confluence.

I expected to uncover duplication, outdated pages and opportunities for improvement, but it quickly became clear that this wasn’t the main problem. This was simply the visible symptoms of a deeper, common challenge across many large organisations: a fragmented ecosystem of platforms, ownership and lack of consistent central governance and culture surrounding content.

We often think of content as something that sits on a website, but in reality, it underpins how people make decisions, complete tasks and deliver services. If content is essential to how an organisation functions, then it is not just a communications asset. It is part of our internal infrastructure, and organisations should treat it that way.

What we discovered about our content landscape

The discovery phase helped to better understand the challenges facing our internal content landscape.

We examined our existing content ecosystem in depth, speaking to content owners and platform users, gathering feedback through surveys, and mapping user journeys across key internal platforms. This helped us to identify pain points and uncover recurring themes.

These challenges spread across multiple internal platforms, where content may be duplicated and not always clearly owned or maintained. Teams were publishing content without shared standards, governance or specialist support, making it harder to create a coherent, consistent and accessible content landscape. This increased the risk of outdated information, inconsistent user experiences and accessibility barriers for colleagues trying to find and use the information they needed.

Furthermore, as artificial intelligence (AI) tools become a bigger part of everyday work, well-structured, accessible and standardised content is essential. High-quality content not only improves the user experience for colleagues but also enables AI tools to surface, interpret and reuse information more accurately and effectively.

The role of the Content Improvement team

Internal content might not attract the same attention as external services, but it has a direct impact on how effectively we work. An outdated page, duplicated process or unclear instruction creates friction for colleagues. Over time, that friction becomes wasted effort and unnecessary demand on support teams.

For years, organisations have invested heavily in creating content. Far fewer have invested in managing it. That’s why governance matters. Good governance isn’t about bureaucracy. It’s about making sure content remains accurate, owned, findable and useful long after it’s published.

Our team exists to improve the quality, consistency and sustainability of our internal content estate. We work alongside and support existing teams with content best practice, good governance and accessibility. Our job is to fix systemic issues, not through tactical tidying, but through a strategic, department‑wide approach.

We sometimes joke that we’re part content designer, part detective and part content police. We spend our time tracing ownership, uncovering duplicate information and investigating why colleagues can’t easily find what they need. Ultimately though, our mission is simple:

Make internal knowledge accurate, findable, governed and accessible so colleagues, and the AI tools they use, can reliably get the right answer at the right time.

Our 3-phase model

The following 3 phases provide an overview of our approach:

Phase 1: Set the standards

In phase 1, we want to create a clear, unified approach to provide a single source of truth that the whole department can adopt.

Before fixing anything, we need to define what “good” looks like.

What we’re doing

Establishing our function as the authoritative owner of internal content standards, guardrails and governance Publishing a standard internal content lifecycle, from creation to archiving Setting rules around ownership, accountability, review cycles, accessibility and version control Mapping critical content journeys and identifying priority content types to fix first Establishing measurement baselines, including search satisfaction, time to find content, and AI accuracy on high-volume queries

Good practice scales thanks to shared rules. Phase 1 builds the foundations for everything that follows.

Phase 2: Fix the past

The largest phase is about cleaning up legacy content. Phase 2 is not a one‑and‑done exercise. It’s a systematic transition to a sustainable, well‑governed ecosystem.

What we’re doing

Running audits across all major platforms: intranet, SharePoint, ServiceNow, Knowledge Base, Confluence, Microsoft tools, etc. Prioritising fixes using data from our findings, feedback and platform analytics Introducing content templates for any new content to bring consistency and meet accessibility requirements Consolidating duplicated internal guidance into single trusted sources Removing or archiving outdated, conflicting or orphaned content Rewriting high‑value content using our new standards, patterns and accessibility expectations

Phase 3: Futureproofing (ongoing)

When the estate is clean and effectively governed, we shift into long‑term sustainability. This phase is focused on raising the standards of internal content – it's not a short-term fix, but a strategic investment in content built to last.

What we’re doing

Working closely with teams across the department to embed permanent review cycles and automated monitoring (expiry dates, metadata checks, orphaned content alerts) Implementing consistent templates across backlog content to improve accessibility and clarity Continuously evolving standards as AI and tools mature – including partnering with AI teams to test retrieval accuracy on live content Training content owners across the department to build capability and confidence Maintaining content improvement as a core competency, making sure the organisation treats content like critical infrastructure rather than a by‑product of policy and operations

What this means for colleagues

The impact of our work will be felt across teams through:

faster answers, less searching – clearer pathways and single sources of truth, less repeated queries to helpdesks more accurate AI responses, because underlying content is better structured, governed and trustworthy better onboarding and capability, as we support colleagues to understand how and why content should be created and set a consistent approach to how we create and manage internal content

The Content Improvement team wasn’t created to fix individual pages. It was created to embed the foundations of good content at scale.

As the project progresses, we will aim to share what we learn and the impact of our work. If you work on similar challenges across government and are interested in learning more about our work, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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