10 Tips for Intranet Redesign Projects

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on November 23, 2009

Molly Emmings also contributed to this blog entry.
The presenters in our last Intersect meeting on 11.17.09 had some valuable stories to tell about their respective intranet design and development projects.  We thought it would be useful to share tips from the presentations, supplemented by some of our own thoughts. 
1. Make sure you have upper management support and a strong project champion who understands the business value of an intranet and can keep driving the effort forward.  Without this support, it’s very difficult for an intranet project to gain any traction.
2. Define a clear set of goals for your intranet site – for example, to serve as a communications hub, to be a central repository for documents, to eliminate the duplication of information, to support and enhance collaboration between divisions, and to break down organizational silos.  The goals you define should inform your site’s design, organization, and feature set.  They should also help you gauge the success of your site once it’s been deployed.
3. Develop a content governance process and related policies, because well-organized, up-to-date, and effective content doesn’t just happen.  You need to assign one or more content “gatekeepers” who have ultimate responsibility for approving and publishing content.  These gatekeepers should have a good grounding in effective writing for the web and basic usability.
4. Create a style guide that lists standards and guidelines to help ensure the site presents useful and effective content.  The style guide should cover writing for the web, when and when not to use PDFs and other non-Web file types, image selection, optimization, and placement, use of acronyms and abbreviations, and so on.
5. Provide robust training to content creators and managers.  This training should cover not only the mechanics of posting and updating content but also how to write and present content effectively for the web.  Depending on the content management system (CMS) or authoring tool you are using, the technical portion of the training may require more or less time.  If you are moving to a new CMS, the training will require substantially more time.  If you have a dispersed employee population, web conferencing tools like WebEx are a useful option for training sessions.
6. If you are implementing a CMS for the first time, or if you are replacing one CMS with a different one, change management will be a critical piece of the project.  Learning a new system, requiring new procedures and techniques, is usually daunting and even a little scary for many employees.  A careful, thorough training program is a must in order to counter the inevitable fight-or-flight response.
7. Follow a user-centered design process.  Get representative users involved by soliciting their input throughout the project, not just before the site goes live.  Users can be involved via surveys, card sort exercises, discussion groups, and usability testing at different stages of design and development.  Testing does not need to be a highly formal activity - testing with just a few people is better than not testing at all.  This will lead to a more usable, effective site.  In addition, by involving employees in the process, it’s much easier to get their acceptance of a new or updated site.
8. When organizing and labeling information, think beyond department- or division-based categories and include topic and audience-based categories as well (e.g., Employee Resources, Managers’ Toolkit, Workplace Resources, Reference Room, etc.).  At some point, everyone is a new employee, and it is not always obvious which department is responsible for certain types of information.  Even veteran employees don’t always have a clear idea of what all the departments do. This is a major weakness of intranet sites that use only department-based navigation categories.
9. Make sure the intranet provides information employees really need and want - that is what will drive traffic to the site.  Use the home page to provide news, updates, and announcements.
10. Consider ways to incorporate employee content into the site, such as photos and bulletin boards.  And strongly consider incorporating video, blogs, discussion forums and other means by which employees and managers can share information, ask questions, and get answers.
In addition to these tips, we’ve put together a short list of useful references.
http://www.usability.gov/
http://www.usa.gov/webcontent/
Garrett, Jesse James. The Elements of User Experience.  2002.
Krug, Steve. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2000.
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/design/ This report reviews “The Year’s 10 Best Intranets.” Note that the examples are all from large companies in the private sector.  The cost is $224 for a single copy.
Redish, Janice.  Letting Go of the Words:  Writing Web Content that Works, 2007.
See more of our recommended resources.

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Surefire Ways to Manage the Review Process - Post-seminar discussion

from Robin Lucas, Director of Project Management

on November 13, 2009

First of all, thanks to everyone who attended our seminar yesterday at the ASTD-TCC Regional Conference.  It was great to meet all of you and J. Hruby and I both enjoyed the presentation and discussion.  One point from yesterday really stuck in my mind and I thought it was worth exploring further here in the blog:
When you include users or learners in your review process for online learning, (and most in the seminar agreed that you should!) how should they be selected?
A couple of thoughts from me and then I’d love to hear your comments: 
* Beware of reviewers who claim they can “represent” the actual learners!  I’m just reiterating this because it was one of the best points that emerged from yesterday’s seminar.  Thank you to the participant who shared a story that illustrated the problems that can occur when anyone other than an actual learner tries to speak for the learner. 
Managers, supervisors, and highly-experienced employees may be eager to volunteer to be reviewers, but only real learners should represent the learner’s point-of-view.
* Select reviewers who represent appropriate skill and experience levels within the learner base.  Area supervisors and highly-experienced employees may be eager to volunteer to be reviewers, but do they always represent the learner’s point-of-view?
* Think about what kind of feedback you want and communicate this clearly to the learner-reviewers.  Be aware that when more experienced employees are involved in reviews, they’ll often want to influence the content and how it’s conveyed so that it reflects their experiences, views about how things should be done, etc. 
That’s fine if this is the type of feedback you’re looking for and you’re in a phase where the content is still under development.  Often times, however, we involve learners because we want opinions about the effectiveness of the content that has already been decided on.  Make sure you understand what you want from your reviewers and then communicate that to them clearly.
Again, we really enjoyed yesterday’s seminar.  Please share your thoughts and comments.

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Can corporate culture be too narrowly defined?

from Joyce Lasecke, President

on November 13, 2009

I believe strongly that corporate cultural fit matters to a person’s success and satisfaction in a job.  I screen prospective employees with that in mind.  And I’m pretty effective at it, and I dare say proud of the skill.  Having shared beliefs about work and how to treat colleagues and customers helps a business run smoothly.
However, some recent reading has reminded me not to be so sure that I’m an authority on corporate cultural fit.  Of course it’s important. But at what point can a quest for shared beliefs turn into a quest for people who think and behave just like oneself? And to what degree is corporate culture a U.S. concept that may unwittingly exclude or alienate people from other countries? Here are what prompted these questions:

• Strengths Based Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie (description at http://strengths.gallup.com/110242/About-Book.aspx.)
• “Why Don’t They Like Us Overseas? Organizing U.S. Business Practices To Manage Culture Clash,” by Thomas M. Begley and David P. Boyd, published in Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 32., No. 4, in 2003 (available for purchase at http://www.sciencedirect.com)

I’m looking forward to conversations with colleagues in other businesses and other countries about their definitions and practices regarding corporate culture. 

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5 Tips for Providing Effective Web Navigation

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on November 03, 2009

For those interested in the connection between the tips listed below and a study of five state Department of Revenue websites, read on past the list.
1. Organize primary navigation menus by audience when your users easily identify with an audience category (e.g., For Job Seekers, For Investors, For Students, etc.).  My experience conducting usability tests supports the key result of a study published last year in the journal Technical Communication:  “Navigation menus that contained links organized by audience were selected more often than menus that contained links organized by topic” (May 2008, p. 186).
2. Precede the audience name with “For” – it helps users quickly recognize that this is information for an audience, not about an audience.  For example, in one usability study I led, there was more task success with the label “For Business” than with “Business” alone because users had a better idea of what to expect. 
3. Provide a secondary topic-based menu to supplement the audience-based menu.  Most users like to have more than one path to the same destination.  In addition, some specialist users may not easily fit into any of the primary audience categories.  Secondary topic menus can be useful in meeting their needs.
4. Guide the user’s eye to what is most important by means of placement, size, images, and subdued color.  On a typical home page, this will usually be the primary menu, the secondary menu, and then news and features, in that order.  When everything is presented in the same way, users have to take longer and work harder to orient themselves to the page.
5. List a selection of 4-5 popular or important links below each audience category.  This will save a significant percentage of users a click to the main audience pathway page and allow them to go directly to what they are looking for.
As part of a recent project, we met with users of a state Department of Revenue (DOR) website and asked them to rate the home pages of five peer sites, focusing especially on navigation:
• Iowa Department of Revenue
• Louisiana Department of Revenue
• Massachusetts Department of Revenue
• Minnesota Department of Revenue
• North Carolina Department of Revenue
The users rated Louisiana the highest and Minnesota the lowest.  So what did Louisiana get right and Minnesota get wrong?  Here are a few summary points.
The Louisiana DOR home page presents three large audience categories front and center, each of which includes an attractive photo of a person, a subdued color, and four related links.  These audience-based categories are very clearly the main doorways into the site for the three main audiences:  Individual Taxpayers, Business Taxpayers, and Tax Professionals.  A topic-based menu is evident just below the page header, but it’s obviously subordinate to the audience menu.
In contrast, finding the audience-based navigation on the Minnesota DOR home page is a little bit like playing “Where’s Waldo”.  It’s there, but see how long it takes you to find it.  The users in our study said they were not sure where to focus – the elements in the main body of the page all seem to have more or less equal weight.  They did not feel the design guided their eye to the priority information.
This was also the issue users identified with the Massachusetts DOR home page, which they rated second lowest.  Although it presents the audience categories by means of tabs near the top of the page, users felt this home page was “too busy” and “cluttered.” When users describe a page in this way, they are saying it is not easy for them to figure out where to focus first, second, and so on.
In the middle of the ratings were Iowa and North Carolina.  Users did not like Iowa’s color palette – to them the lime green was an “odd” choice not suitable for a government agency.  And they thought the font was too small.  But for ease of use, Iowa came out slightly ahead of North Carolina because of its relative simplicity, the lack of scrolling required, and the selection of links provided for each audience category.
The top-rated Louisiana DOR home page is not perfect.  The rectangular graphic links in the middle of the page look too much like advertisements and would be ignored by users, and the light grey font is a little hard to read and is too small in the news and announcements section.  But overall, Louisiana’s home page provides a better front door than either Massachusetts’ or Minnesota’s.

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