Little Brothers of the Poor
The non-profit organization Les Petits Frères des Pauvres entrusted us with the redesign of its document intranet using Drupal 9. As a key tool for coordinating, documenting, and training the association’s employees and volunteers (more than 12,000 users), the intranet is also a gateway to the entire application system of the organization.
Our missions
- UX design
- UI design
- Development
- Maintenance
- Accommodation
A Drupal 9 intranet
for 12,000 users
Founded in 1946 by Armand Marquiset, the association Petits Frères des Pauvres now represents a network of more than 12,000 volunteers and 600 employees at over 300 locations. It is the largest association, together with its Foundation and facilities, specializing in issues related to the isolation of the elderly.
The association had an outdated intranet dating back to 2008. It entrusted the overhaul of its intranet to the agency bluedrop.fr in order to have a tool to facilitate the engagement, information, and training of its employees and volunteers.
The association wanted to undertake the redesign of its intranet site for the following reasons:
- Features have remained unchanged since its launch in 2008
- Underuse of the intranet (only 1,000 active accounts)
- Documents are difficult to find
- Deficient search engine
- Content architecture not optimized
- Poor display performance
Our intervention
This phase targeted two specific groups: employees and volunteers.
- Drafting of functional specifications
- Conducting an ergonomics audit
- Defining zoning and wireframes
- Defining the user journeys
- Design studio workshops in order to quickly generate design solutions to a design problem
- Conducting user tests with 10 users, among the association’s employees and volunteers: these in particular allowed for modification of menu titles, the favorites management process, the layout of homepage blocks, and validation of the site's accessibility.
This involves transforming wireframes into designed graphic mockups. For this project, we chose an Atomic Design approach for implementing the mockups and preparing instructions for the development team.
The UI design process includes:
- The definition of the artistic direction, and development of the web graphic charter
- Designing the desktop and mobile mockups
- Creating graphic elements (pictograms, logo variations, visuals)
- Deployment of Drupal 9 Core and necessary contributed modules
- Migration of content from the old intranet, developed in PHP with a custom solution
- Implementation of tools and configurations to facilitate contribution
- Installation of the site on production servers
- Provision of technical documentation for the developed platform
- Training for future CMS users: administrator and editors
Since the intranet went live, we have been providing hosting and management of the different environments, as well as the preventive, corrective, and adaptive maintenance of the site, since the users, now involved, are directly responsible for requests for functional improvements.
Technical scope
Theming and frontend integration
The project team chose to use the emulsify theme, in line with its atomic integration approach. This theme provides a Storybook component library, a webpack development environment, and a Drupal starter kit. We used it as a prototyping tool within the Drupal installation.
We also paid special attention to the contributor experience by using the Gin theme and a few comfort settings for content contributors. Contribution is also enhanced with 11 types of paragraphs that can be configured for multiple content types.
We would like to warmly thank the project team of Petits Frères des Pauvres, who collaborated throughout this unique year with optimism and determination... All while continuing to carry out their field missions. We have fond and deeply moving memories of this time!
Thank you to the Little Brothers of the Poor for their positive feedback
"The success of the project and its adoption by intranet users were made possible, despite the unprecedented health context, thanks to the professionalism of the project team at bluedrop.fr agency, who were proactive in finding solutions that met our challenges. We can now listen to the users and work on further developing the intranet."
