we are: London

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

Last week, the World Bank announced that it was to free up 2,000 financial, business, health, economic and human development statistics that had mostly been available only to paying subscribers.

“It’s important to make the data and knowledge of the World Bank available to everyone,” World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick said. “Statistics tell the story of people in developing and emerging countries and can play an important part in helping to overcome poverty.”

This presents massive opportunities for developing countries, whose researchers will have access to useful and meaningful information that could well be integral to their future economic development. In the midst of the global financial crisis (yes, it’s still going on), access to this data has the scope to fit in well with the data ‘mash-up’ market that has grown since a number of governments’ recent initiatives (including the UK’s www.data.gov.uk) to free up data to the general public.

On a level closer-to-home, it’s exciting to have access to this level of detailed statistical information, as the ease with which it can be tracked, monitored and updated makes repurposing it not only more reliable in terms of reporting but also demonstrates that numbers and figures (when illustrated in an engaging way) have the ability to tell a story just as well as pictures and words.

Blog, Community, internet research, usability research data, Internet, research, world bank

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

Only a week has passed since one of the most significant design faux pars of recent times launched.

In that time a wide range of press and interested parties have slated the website www.bethere.co.uk as an horrendous example of design gone bad.

In our usual pragmatic style we have decided to review it from a customer point of view rather than cast our critical design eye on it.

Q. So what do the general public think?

A. Not good, in fact with the odd exception the site has been universally criticised as being the worst redesign of the year.

Many a true word Twittered in haste.

Our favourite quote on Twitter is:

“If I didn’t know that the new website was for real I’d think it had been hacked to be honest!“

That’s pretty damming and more recent quotes are questioning Be’s ability to provide a good broadband service based on how poor their site is.

So how did the Be brand become such an anchor?

Only Be’s marketing team can answer that one and I guess the agency who created the site, which offers a number of very similar designs for other clients, only not quite so 80’s.

Pointless dynamic help

However all of these negative, and no doubt expensive, reactions and customer feedback could have been spotted, corrected and mitigated by simply asking their customers during the design phase.

Customer’s views count, get them before they get you!

As a user centred design champion, we are always looking for good and bad examples of sites that either choose to embrace or reject their customer’s views during the initial design phases.

Again I can not know if the site was tested prior to launch, but I have a hunch that it wasn’t otherwise it would not end up looking like this.

Brand and usability go hand in hand

Finally, an even bigger problem is that the site just does not work very well. There are prompts in forms that aren’t needed, readability is a strain thanks to over saturated colours and the accessibility is so bad I don’t know where to start.

The bottom line makes good reading for agencies like us, who are here to help businesses meet their customers needs, whilst working with big, brash design companies, creating brilliantly branded, usable and accessible websites, first time, every time.

If you want to Be better than your competition and avoid upsetting your customers then contact us to see how our research and user centred design services can work for you.

Be*en There Before, in the 80's

accessibility, information architecture, interface design, market research, usability design, user centred design, user interface Design, Internet, research, Twitter, usability

We are:London has been lucky enough to have recently been involved in some exciting form design and research. From our recently conducted research some interesting design considerations have come to light. One of the main areas is user handholding.

User handholding is a double edged sword. A fine balance must be struck between useful support and wrapping the user up in cotton wool. Our recent testing revealed some interesting user attitudes towards the support of both inline validation and automatic inline help. Providing the user with inline validation gave the user a sense of achievement. It helped them feel they were walking the correct path, reassuring them.

When creating a password for a Google account the user is provided with reassurance of its security level.

Automatic inline help however had an adverse affect. While on first appearances help of this nature supports the user, holds their hand and aids the smooth completion of the form the user’s impressions however were not of this nature. The user felt this patronised them, that providing automatic help for every field treated them as if they were incompetent and unable to complete the form.

Do users of the British Gas site need prompting to enter their first name in the ‘First name’ field?

These attitudes develop into interesting design challenges. A form must provide a supportive environment for the user. It must help them when they need help and reassure them that they are on the right path. A form must also not patronise the user. It must not try to support when support is not needed. Inline validation helps to reassure the user while trusting the user that they are intelligent and aware enough to complete the form fields without support. Automatic inline help can be used sparingly but overuse makes the user feel they are being patronised. Users do not need help on how to fill out their name. Offering user activated help allows users easy access to support when needed but allows them to choose when they require it.

Blog, information architecture, usability research, user interface Internet, research, usability

 I don’t ordinarily consider gossip-blogger Perez Hilton a source of social marketing insight but on this occasion he twittered a report by Sysomos - a US based organisation specialising in media monitoring - and its actually quite interesting.

 

Sysomos analysed more than 11.5 million Twitter accounts, indexing user profiles and looking at the frequency of status updates and behaviours over a period of time. There is plenty of data to mine through but some key findings of note include:

 

• 21% of all registered users have never even posted a Tweet;
• More than 50% of all updates are publishing using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com;
• 65% of Twitter users are under the age of 25 ; and
• Just 5% of users - or Power-Tweeters as we shall call them - account for a massive 75% of all activity.

Twitter has experienced explosive growth in recent months and this report is essential reading in helping to understand why.

 

Read the report here

 

Blog, Community, customer insight, e-commerce, internet research, market research insight, research, social networking, Twitter