A UX-led redesign of the internal platform supporting Australia's national blood and plasma service.
Australian Red Cross Lifeblood runs the country's blood and plasma service. It's a mission-critical operation that depends on thousands of staff and volunteers across collection centres, processing facilities, donor services and clinical teams. The intranet is how that workforce coordinates, finds the information they need, and gets through their day.
The brief was a full UX redesign of the platform: making it easier to use, bringing it in line with the public Lifeblood brand, and creating something the organisation could be proud of internally as well as externally. Because this was an internal product, screens aren't shown in this case study; the work is described instead.
Like most long-running enterprise platforms, the existing intranet had accumulated rather than evolved. Information had been added in layers by different teams over time, each with their own logic, their own taxonomy, their own way of writing. Staff could usually find what they were looking for, but the path there was rarely the one they expected, and the experience felt visually disconnected from the Lifeblood brand the organisation worked so hard to build publicly.
The opportunity was clear. Reorganise the information architecture around how staff actually worked. Bring the visual system into alignment with Lifeblood's external brand. Rewrite the platform's copy in a voice that matched the rest of the organisation. Quiet down the noise so the important things could be heard.
Many years of additive change. Different teams, different conventions, different voices.
A single platform, designed around how the work actually flows. One system, one voice.
A project at this scale lives or dies on stakeholder trust. Before any wireframing began, we spent time with people from across the organisation, listening to how they used the platform, what frustrated them, what they needed it to do that it currently couldn't. The job in the early weeks wasn't to design; it was to understand.
From there, the work moved into structured phases: information architecture, content design and copy refinement, visual design within the existing Lifeblood brand system, prototyping with real users, and a phased build. At every stage the working group included people from the departments who would actually use what we shipped. They weren't consulted at the end; they were part of the design from the start.
Cross-departmental projects succeed when every group with skin in the game has a seat at the table and a clear path for their input. Throughout this engagement, we worked closely with the following teams, running workshops, gathering feedback, and aligning on direction before each major design decision.
The work followed a clear sequence: research first, design second, build third, with explicit checkpoints between each phase so stakeholders could review and steer. No black boxes. No surprise unveilings. The working group saw everything as it took shape.
Stakeholder interviews, analytics review, audit of existing content and structure.
Information architecture, taxonomy, content strategy and tone-of-voice principles.
Wireframes, UI within the Lifeblood brand system, and copy refinement across templates.
Prototyping and usability testing with staff from across the organisation.
Front-end build, content migration, and phased rollout with feedback loops.
The redesign touched four interconnected layers of the experience. Each was a project in itself; together, they made the platform feel like one product instead of many.
UX & Information Architecture. The platform was reorganised around staff workflows rather than internal org structure. We mapped how people actually moved through the site, simplified the navigation, and rebuilt the taxonomy so that the same thing was called the same name everywhere it appeared.
UI & Brand Alignment. Working closely with the brand team, we brought the platform into line with Lifeblood's public-facing identity: type system, colour application, iconography, photography treatment. Staff opening the intranet now experience the same brand they see everywhere else.
Copy & Tone. A meaningful share of the project was content work: auditing existing copy, removing duplication, rewriting in a consistent voice, and giving teams templates and guidelines so future content additions stayed on-brand. The result is a platform that sounds like one organisation, not a dozen.
Build. The redesign was implemented in close collaboration with the internal engineering team. Phased rollout with feedback at each stage meant we could refine in flight rather than discover problems on launch day.
Enterprise UX work is, more than anything, a stakeholder discipline. The craft of the design matters, but the project doesn't get to the design without trust built across teams that don't normally work together. The unlock was treating every department as a collaborator rather than a sign-off, and putting their input into the work visibly so they could see themselves in the final result.
The other unlock was respecting the brand that already existed. Lifeblood's external identity is strong and considered. The job wasn't to reinvent it for the intranet. It was to extend it inward, with the same care it gets when it faces the public.