10 Tips for Intranet Redesign Projects

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on November 23, 2009

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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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