Intranet DASHBOARD to GreenOrbit

An intranet and digital-workplace product sold to companies who then brand it as their own. It was called intranet DASHBOARD, it was at version 9 when I joined in 2016, and by the time I left it was GreenOrbit: rebuilt across four surfaces, responsive, and standing on a design system that did not exist before.

Why it happened

Not because the product was failing. iD9 worked, and it had customers. What happened was a brand event: the company rebranded to Effective Digital, and the product was rebranded and reworked into GreenOrbit alongside it. The mandate was a new name and a new look.

It was never scoped as a reskin, either. Responsive was in the brief from the start, which for a 2016 intranet meant rebuilding the thing rather than restyling it: the iD9 home page was a dense desktop portal with quick links, agenda, tasks, news and a week calendar all above the fold, all assuming a mouse. Making that work from a phone forces the question of what an intranet home page is for, and no amount of new colour answers it.

I ran a competitive read of the other platforms in the category first, less to find defects than to find where a nine-version-old product had quietly fallen behind what buyers now expected. A good part of the job was simply making it look current. An interface nine versions old signals its age whether or not anything in it is broken, and in a category sold on being a modern place to work, looking dated is a commercial problem rather than a cosmetic one.

The tooling had to change first

Before I arrived, interface design happened in Photoshop and Illustrator. By 2016 that was clearly the wrong tool: no components, no shared styles, no way to hand a developer anything but a flat picture and a set of measurements. We tried Adobe XD briefly. Then I pushed the company onto Figma and ran hands-on training to get the designers and the marketing team comfortable in it.

The order matters. A product rebuilt across four surfaces cannot be held together by files that have no concept of a shared component, so the tool change came before the design work rather than alongside it.

The design system underneath

Built in Figma, and smaller in scale than the one I own at Trunkrs now, but the same idea: one place where a component and a value are decided once. What it could be was bounded by what Figma could do in those years. There were no variables, so there was no token layer in the sense the word now means. A system then meant shared colour and text styles plus a component library, and consistency past that point was a matter of discipline rather than something the file could enforce.

Constraints that shaped it

Every customer rebrands it, through a narrow slot. An intranet product ships as somebody else's intranet: the demo tenants in my own early explorations carry a made-up corporate identity, logo and all, because that is what a customer sees on day one. The theming surface is deliberately small though, a few colour choices and some banner images, which makes it a more interesting constraint than a full white-label would be. The customer's brand has to feel present while almost every visual decision stays ours, so those few slots have to be the ones that read as identity, and everything else has to hold up without them.

Four surfaces, one product line. The employee-facing intranet, the admin side where it gets configured, the mobile app, and the help centre. They share a system and they do not share a user: an employee looking up a payslip, an intranet manager building a page, and someone reading documentation are three different people, and the admin surface in particular had a habit of being designed as though its users were us.

Where the line sat

An external vendor did the Effective Digital and GreenOrbit identities. My job was to take an identity I did not draw and make a four-surface product out of it, which is a different discipline from brand design and is the one I was there to do.

So the scope came from elsewhere and the execution did not. The rebrand set the deadline, the brand vendor set the look, and responsive was in the brief. What I brought that was not asked for was the tooling and the system underneath: Figma instead of Photoshop, and one place where a component and a value are decided once. The responsive mobile app sits beside the intranet as well, for the things a phone is better at than a page.

What shipped, and how

GreenOrbit, across web front end, admin, and the mobile app, on the new design system, with the help centre alongside it. The work was named a finalist for Best UX/UI Design in a SaaS Product at the 2019 SaaS Awards.

Alongside the product line I did custom intranet builds for individual customers, bespoke branding for those, mobile app work, and print and illustration support for the marketing team. An agency that had narrowed to a single product still had agency habits, and the range was part of the job.

Honest edges

The rebrand drove this, not a user problem I had identified and campaigned about, and the responsive scope was in the brief rather than something I argued for. I would rather say that than construct a usability crisis or a lone-advocate story after the fact. What is mine here is narrower and I think more useful: the tooling move and the system underneath, neither of which anybody asked me for.

I do not know what survived. I left in December 2020, the company later took the product's name and is now part of Knosys, and I have no visibility into whether the design system is still in use or was replaced. A system whose author leaves is a real test of whether it was ever transferrable, and this one I never got to see the result of. That is part of why the Trunkrs system is documentation first.

The larger honest edge is what happened next. On 27 August 2026, in its FY26 results, Knosys announced it was exiting the GreenOrbit intranet business and had signed an agency agreement with Oak Engage to migrate GreenOrbit's customers onto another intranet platform. Seven years after the redesign was nominated, the product line is being wound down.

I would guess the pandemic is a good part of why. It arrived not long after GreenOrbit shipped and brought a wave of tools for getting work done remotely, several of which did a useful part of what an intranet was for. That is inference rather than something I watched happen from inside. What is not inference is the shape of it: a category can be modernised, be nominated for how well it was modernised, and still lose its reason to exist. What this work was for was making a dated product current. It did that. The market moved anyway.