Sector(s)
Project Team
- SparkFabrik: Consultancy & Design, UX Research, UX/UI Design, Drupal and custom web development, Cloud Native / DevOps
- CNP UniCredit Vita: HR, Internal Communication, product ownership
CNP UniCredit Vita is a life insurance company partnered with UniCredit S.p.A. and part of the French group CNP Assurances S.A., with more than 170 years of history in the European insurance market. It has operated in Italy since 2005 and, from 2021, also in the open market following the acquisition of Aviva's Italian life companies.
The organization wanted to support a distributed, partly remote workforce with a genuine internal digital community rather than a static, top-down intranet. The platform had to keep information from every department current, feel personal to each employee, encourage daily return visits, and let non-technical HR and communication teams manage content and layout.
About the project
Goals
Create an Employee Experience Platform that a partly remote workforce would want to open every day: a single place to stay informed, act on daily tasks, connect with colleagues, and shape the platform itself, while HR and Internal Communication manage everything independently.
Challenge
The project was framed around four pillars: a comprehensive, always-current intranet spanning every department; a personal tool that adapts to each employee; a community space that makes distant colleagues feel present; and an open platform that treats users as protagonists of change, not just readers. The build also had to preserve long-term layout flexibility for non-technical editors and integrate external analytics.
Solution
SparkFabrik ran a co-design process (mid-fidelity wireframes and navigable UX/UI prototypes shared continuously with the client) and delivered a first production release with all core functionality, kept open to evolution based on real usage. The design used a clean atomic-design system aligned with the brand to reduce screen fatigue.
Highlights:
- Personal workspace: favorite-content lists, document bookmarks, read-later reading lists, and customizable toolbar shortcuts.
- Community features: comments and reactions across the application, employee-created notice-board announcements, and user-suggested glossary terms.
- Editorial control: moderation tools, "promoted to front page" featured news and events, "urgent" news styling, chronological news, a Corporate Library of documents, and a Latest Updates feed with timestamps.
- Engaging dashboard: an opening block with weather, a quote of the day/week, and live online-user count.
- Analytics: integrated Matomo, with moderation and statistical reports for administrators.
Outcome
- The platform launched with strong acceptance and adoption across the company.
- The Italian intranet became the model for the group's French colleagues, who requested a clone.
- Its effectiveness led CNP Vita to have SparkFabrik build a second, similar intranet for another group company (CNP Vita Assicurazione), online since July 2023.
- HR and Internal Communication manage content and layout autonomously, and the intranet became the company's central internal-communication tool.
"SparkFabrik responded promptly to our wish for a more structured, functional and dynamic intranet, making it the fundamental tool of internal communication."
Elena Trussardi, Head of CSR, Internal Communication & Events, CNP Vita
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was chosen over a packaged intranet product or proprietary employee-portal suite because it is a content and application framework, not a fixed product:
- Structured content modeling: news, events, documents, glossary terms, notice-board announcements, and information pages each map to their own content type and taxonomy, so the same information powers many views and personalized feeds.
- Editorial autonomy: HR and Internal Communication update content and rearrange page layout through a familiar authoring interface, with no developer involvement.
- Built-in community and interaction: comments, reactions, user-generated announcements, and glossary suggestions turn a read-only intranet into a two-way space.
- Personalization: favorites, document bookmarks, read-later lists, and customizable shortcuts are built per user on Drupal's user and entity model.
- Editorial governance: moderation states and role-based permissions let editors publish, promote, and flag content as "urgent" or "featured" safely.
- Extensibility and open source: no per-seat licensing, with a clear path to add features as needs evolve.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal's structured content model let every information type (news, events, documents, glossary terms, announcements) be modeled once and reused across personalized feeds, listings, and dashboards. Its entity and user systems made per-user personalization (favorites, bookmarks, read-later lists, shortcuts) and two-way community interaction (comments, reactions, user-contributed content) natural to build rather than bolt on.
Editorial workflow and role-based permissions gave HR and Internal Communication safe, autonomous control over publishing, promotion, and layout, with no developer in the loop. Standards-based configuration and a large contrib ecosystem allowed external analytics integration and left a clear path to keep evolving the platform as employee needs change.
