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At best Intranet design is a challenging task for most, at worst it’s a thankless job that sits at the bottom of many companies priority lists.
Taking ownership can be a daunting prospect, especially as many intranets are unfocused, sprawling repositories of content and ideas, grown organically over a long period. But taking ownership is the first step in putting a tool in place that can quickly become a high priority on the business comms list.

Over the past couple of years, intranets have become a hot topic within large and small businesses, and within the world of digital design. New platforms, techniques and an ever blurring line between the Internet and company Intranets driven through the integration of social, UGC, multimedia and semantic technologies has led to more stakeholders, with more requests and usually less budget.

Persuasive design

One of our most common findings during user and stakeholder research is that reason an intranet is unused and unloved is due to the fact that it’s never worked and never been adopted by the business.

Every task users are asked to complete online should at least as easy as off-line methods, or easier, otherwise users will always fall back to the default of asking a colleague, phoning a department or worse not doing anything.

The reason behind this is that existing staff have learnt their way round the system over time, usually years and new joiners are forced to struggle through anyway they can. A recent client’s intranet is so bad that new joiners are given a guided tour as part of their induction and then offered a CD-Rom or online video tutorial. I doubt any owners of an Internet site would expect a tutorial on how to use the site as acceptable; just make it easy to use.

I’m ready to be engaged

Whilst your intranet is unlikely to become “the” destination for your staff and should not try to replace other sources of external information, it should be functional and engaging in equal measures.

Features that rank highly from a users perspective usually include:

• Buy, sell, rent
• Interest groups (sports, social, clubs)
• Lunch menu

For business engagement, these features rank highly:

• Ask the management (live Q&A)
• Personnel contact finder
• Collaboration tools (wikis and connectors)

It’s important to remember that many of the tasks that your staff use the intranet for can only be completed online, so usage should not be confused with satisfaction. Providing tools and services that help staff to become engaged with the business and each other will prove invaluable in driving uptake and long term use of the site.

“Don’t underestimate the power of the intranet for fostering a sense of culture & belonging - it may not be a core ‘money-earner’, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.”

How to guide

A few points that may help you in planning and designing your intranet include:

• Governance to avoid organic growth - The key to providing a consistent and usable experience is providing a strict governance model to ensure quality control. Intranets by nature are created and controlled by many people and departments and without solid governance grow organically into a combination of different style and experiences.
• Ownership and stakeholder involvement - Many challenges are faced throughout the redesign of an intranet as there is often no clear owner. Different sections and content are owned by different departments and stakeholders. It is important to include all stakeholders to both understand content and to promote a feeling of inclusion and acceptance of the work within the various content owners. This can present many challenges within time and cost restraints.
• Content - Large volumes of content can make it difficult for users to find what they need. Intranets can easily be into tens of thousands of pages. Content can generally be clearly split into two types. Content that is generated by a department specifically for employees of that department (IT generating content for IT employees) and content that is generated by a department for all employees (HR generating content aimed at all employees of the company). Splitting the information like this can dramatically improve the ease of finding content by isolating information only needed by a single department in a departmental section.
• Can’t find what you are looking for? - If content is difficult to find many users will resort to other channels such as asking colleagues to find important information. Information should be easily available so that users do not need to resort to other methods.
• Navigation - Navigation is key to providing a consistent experience and allowing users to find and move through content. In an environment where this may be defined by many different content creators it is important to ensure they follow a strict model, usually by service offered and not by business function.

Next steps

It’s important to have a plan when working on your intranet and it’s valid not matter what stage you are at, defining a new site or migrating to a new platform. Here are a few points to follow:

1. Take ownership; whilst often a daunting task, your ability to lead the project will ultimately deliver a very successful site.
2. Don’t under estimate the scale of the task in hand; updating, migrating or creating an intranet from scratch requires a lot of time, effort and support.
3. Use external consultants; they will bring a wealth of experience, offer an objective view and can help to mediate difficult decisions.
4. Don’t redesign standards; user staff are familiar with Google, eBay, Linked In and Facebook, use these interfaces rather than creating your own, bespoke ones.
5. Start collaborating now; get a range of staff involved in the redesign, they’ll become your champions and power users down the line.
6. Benchmark; creating some form of  measurement will help to justify the time and financial investments needed for short and long term success.
7. Don’t let the software control you; the platform is important but the business requirements and user needs should lead the design process.
8. Content strategy; know what you plan to do with the content and create a strategy for developing it long term.

If you have found this useful, then why not get in touch and see how we can help accelerate the success of your businesses intranet.

Content strategy, Intranet, global usability testing, information architecture, usability research, user centred design, user interface innovation, Intranet, research, usability, user experience

Love him or hate him.

It all comes down to one single, tangible factor, which marks out the good from the bad; soul.

The reason for the Clarkson tribute on the left is this weeks Sunday Times Motoring article on an Aston Martin which sees Clarkson pitting it against design perfection in the shape of an Audi R8 V10.

And to save you the read, the Audi is just too perfect, where as the Aston has soul, something that can’t be created by following set rules, but comes from the heart of those involved and is a direct result of the creator’s passion.

All of which brings us nicely to the argument that has raged on since the start of website design; who is best placed to create the perfect site?

The Good, the bad and the ugly.

Let’s go back to basics and look at who the usual suspects are, in the red corner we have “visual designers” (brand and marketing) and in the blue corner we have “interaction designers” (user centred).

Whilst visual designers have a wealth of ability and passion, it is often focused to heavily on making something look good and the risk of making the same, beautiful creation completely unusable.

Now wheel in the interaction designers, who’s passions lie in the creation of the perfect experience, through usability testing, prototyping and more testing. However, there is a strong argument against all of this testing and refining as it can just blunt a sharp, creative idea, making the end result more function than form.

Experience is all, or read Experiential

For years I thought experiential was about experiencing a design, but it’s not it’s about experience, and this where soul comes from.

An experienced designer is passionate about the look and the effectiveness of a design and ensures their soul is applied to everything they do.

An excellent example of what not to do is a site we reviewed a while back that seemingly missed both design and ease of use steps during it’s development and almost certainly skipped public testing.

Help me help you

If you want to avoid the common pitfalls of digital procurement, ensuring your acgency has soul, then follow these easy steps:

• Check potential agencies have a proven user centred design methodology as well as a creative portfolio
• Ask for CVs of key staff and make sure they are guaranteed to be on the project
• Meet the team and chat to them about what they think is good and bad
• Don’t ever feel that it’s not your right to ask questions
• Ask for clarification on every point until it’s clear
• Remember you’re the client and paying the bills

If you would like to know more then give me a call or drop me a note and we’ll take you through our experiences and see how we can help.

global usability testing, information architecture, interface design, internet research, market research, usability design, user centred design, user interface Design, e-commerce, Internet, Mobile, research, usability

How reliable are the views of six customers who fit a brief when it comes to feedback from a usability lab? The answer lies in the competence of the interviewer or moderator and the team who are implementing the research findings.

But six views are always going to be limited and, usually, geographically similar. Add to this the travel stress of getting to the lab, unfamiliar surroundings and someone else’s computer, only the best moderators can achieve good results from this audience.

Remote research, which follows the same one to one interview technique with moderator and panellist, allows a much wider reach in terms of audience location and numbers. The cost of lab hire can be used to recruit more panellists, typically twelve to eighteen.

These customers are now in familiar surroundings, using the same computer that they use to go online everyday and have much lower stress levels the only effort made is putting on the kettle.

When is a lab not a lab?

At this point we should state that lab based research does have a place and a need, and to be most effective can be run with remote research.

Lab research allows us to see how the customer is reacting visually, their change of posture, use of mouse and keyboard and facial expression which remote testing does not. It is also a great environment to use mixed media such as paper prototypes, card sorts, printed stimulus and multiple interactive models. And it’s a controlled environment where we know everything will work and a client can also watch the customer’s body language.

Results in days

The nature of remote research means that it is much quicker for us to recruit and run sessions as there is minimal effort required form the customers perspective. Even session lengths are shorter as there is no need for the panellists to take in new surroundings, familiars themselves with a new computer and get to grips with different screen sizes and browser settings.

Typically a project can be briefed on Monday, recruited Tuesday, run Wednesday and Thursday and reported on Friday. However, the more complex the audience, task or number of models the longer the recruitment, set up and facilitation takes.

We have run a lot of very successful remote research sessions during information architecture projects that we have been involved in, the most recent being a two day turn around on a travel portal prototype that we had been developing.

Client participation

Most importantly is the fact that the sessions are equal as accessible to the client and other stakeholders that are involved. Each one to one session is scheduled in advance, an email sent out and all that is needed is for observers to download a small plug-in, which takes seconds, and voila you can now see what we can see, which is the panellist computer monitor.

Two way conversation, in real time, between the panellist and the moderator is available through a conference call facility that everyone can dial into and direct chat with the moderator is enabled through the observation software. This features allows you, the client, to direct each session and get the most from it.

Finally, everything that is done on screen and said during each session is digitally recorded and can the video can be hosted in full, transferred to DVD or edited into highlight clips.

Ultimately, every method of research has a place and the agency pitching for your work should justify not only the methodology but also identify the best solution for you, often this may seem more complex but ultimately it will lead to far better results.

global usability testing, market research, usability research usability

Last night I took a cab in the snow across London and my cabbie was about to head off on a cruise for 10 days. Once he knew I worked with the interweb he took it upon himself to blame me for every rubbish website out there.

His view was that no one website was designed with him in mind, and they all tried to do things differently, which ends up just becoming confusing.

So I started to find out what he wanted and quickly realised that he had some amazing insight into improving website usability, especially as his wife is French and she has a totally different view of what is important and not on a travel website.

Having undertaken a wide range of research across travel websites over the past few years, the more we do, the more I realise that asking people like Dave the cabbie their views, wants and needs is increasingly more important in ensuring what you are doing online is right.

It’s still too easy to forget about the end user in the rush to launch new sites, but it does not have to cost much or take long to run a round remote testing on a quick prototype or implement multivariate research on your existing site.

National Express are doing all of the above and more to ensure that the solutions that we are developing work as well as they can and constantly evolve to meet changing customer needs.

So if you want to unravel your travel then remember to ask Dave.

customer insight, global usability testing, usability research e-commerce, Internet, usability

The recent on going developments to Deloitte’s UK Career website, provided by CADinteractive has help secure a No.1 position in this years Potential Park “Top Career Website”.
This is a great achievement for The Global Careers team, who were hoping to build on last years results and are over the moon with a win.

CADinteractive undertook a global research project for Deloitte in 2006/07 that lead to a complete redesign of the site and further on going improvements.

Find out more about CADinteractive’s award winning research and design services.

global usability testing, usability research, user centred design