People’s Choice Winner 2018: Destination Canada

One of our favourite intranet award categories is our People’s Choice Award.

We have a large community of intranet enthusiasts, so even though we feel like we know what makes a good intranet, it’s even more exciting to see what others view as a great one! We have to admit, this winner was a favorite of ours too.

Destination Canada designs intranet to reflect how people travel

As Canada’s national tourism marketing organization, Destination Canada is responsible for marketing Canada as a premier four-season tourism destination. Its 100 plus employees rely on accurate, up-to-the-minute market intelligence to stay competitive within the global tourism industry.

When they launched their new intranet—Explore DC—they had a clear end goal in mind: To ensure all employees could easily find relevant and visually appealing content. “With design as our beacon, we built our pages applying a blend of function and aesthetics moving to a more visual site to accommodate our international offices and reduce language barriers,” said Natasha Langlois, Strategic Advisor for Corporate and Employee Communications.

They even designed Explore DC to reflect how people travel: for leisure or for business. The right side panel of the homepage allows users to navigate their travels on the intranet with social features and links along that panel (calendar, social committee link, marketing Twitter feed, etc.). Meanwhile, the left side panel is all business, with links to external work sites and their corporate Twitter feed.

Icons also played an enormous role in their interface design and have positively impacted the user experience. They represent teams, groups, and links to outside sites. The result has been instant visual recognition of the icons, which has improved the navigability of the site, as well as an understanding of who owns what content. And if that wasn’t enough, DC even created a recycled brown paper background image to reinforce their renewed commitment to green initiatives.

The best outcome from their design work relates to their adoption and usage of Explore DC. “Our intranet has worked beyond our wildest dreams,” beamed Natasha. “Our Staff are now engaged and want to contribute to the colour and fabric of our organization in beautiful ways.”

If you want to read more about how Destination Canada used their intranet, we recommend reading their case study. They reveal a really cool story related to the tracking of tourism numbers!