FCPS Intranet

Overview

With 186,000 students enrolled across 200+ schools and centers and 24,000 full-time staff, Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) in Virginia is one of the largest public school districts in the nation.

Forum One worked with FCPS to digitally transform their intranet into a secure, personalizable, and easy-to-use portal for FCPS employees to quickly and effectively find content. Major improvements include integrated Solr search capabilities, a transition from VPN use to mobile-friendly single sign-on that enabled increased staff access, improved user personalization via favoriting and subscription feeds, and an intuitive, WYSIWYG content creation interface that allows administrators to incorporate files, images, and other media into a variety of content types.

Forum One has provided ongoing maintenance and support to the intranet since its launch as a long-term partner to FCPS, upgrading the platform to Drupal 9 and realizing continuous improvements based on user feedback, site analytics, and emerging priorities.

My Role

While some might think that an intranet is a dry project, I love it as an example of pure graphic design and fundamentals. Visual interest is created from typography, negative space, an understated use of color, and clear UI. On this project we were challenged with making information-heavy pages that had no imagery visually appealing and easy to scan. I was responsible for visual design and applying, updating, and extending the intranet brand system based on the FCPS website.

One of my favorite pages is the tools layout because the cards had to handle a wide variety of logos that were not designed as part of a consistent system and be flexible enough to handle situations where there wasn’t always a logo. I feel this page is especially successful given the constraints.

The result is an intranet that is easy to use, looks clean, and helps tens of thousands of teachers and staff stay connected and perform their jobs more efficiently.