Insight article
Building on Intranet Usability
Justin Borntraeger, Content Strategist
September 2008
Introduction
According to a 2007 Nielsen study, intranets are no longer the “impoverished cousins of websites,” but rather have success rates that average 33% higher than the Web [1]. A Web search for intranet best practices unofficially corroborates that data—many results address how to incorporate information architecture rather than whether it’s necessary. That’s good news and represents a more mature view of intranets that companies have long lacked.
I have seen the shift myself over the 18 months I’ve worked on building, populating, and refining a large government intranet. Instead of debating the necessity of information architecture and usability testing, the client is now revising content in response to Web analytics. By most measures, the intranet is a success in terms of usability. So we’re done, right? No—in fact we’ve just begun.
A Usable Platform is a Good Start
As heartening as the Nielsen data are, anyone involved with an intranet needs to be careful not to think of usability as the terminal goal of an intranet project. All effective intranets are usable, but not all usable intranets are effective. That’s because usability only reflects a site’s navigational clarity, intuitiveness, and ease in attaining specific goals. An intranet might receive extremely high success rates, and in all aspects be considered usable, but might not match the needs of many users. And you’re right if you say that’s a paradox. How can something usable not fulfill user needs? Isn’t user research an important part of building a usable site, and doesn’t user research involve determining user needs?
The answer is that striving for usability alone is aiming only for efficiency and not for the right substance or content. Imagine a vending machine that is attractive, delivers unbroken items within one second, and is so intuitive that no instructions are necessary. That’s a very usable machine. But this particular vending machine is stocked with sardines and prunes. Yuck. The good news is that the machine itself – the framework – is great. It just needs to provide better substance to the user. The machine represents many intranets that have been thoughtfully built in reaction to the terribly-built intranets of five and ten years ago, but have not been thoughtfully stocked with relevant and appealing content.
How to Provide Better Content
How does one provide better content? As I mentioned previously, the client on my intranet project is revising content based on Web analytics. On the one hand, that thrills me because it means we are firmly in the content phase of the project, and content is what I love. On the other hand, I’m apprehensive because tweaking content based on Web analytics means that we are restricting ourselves to the universe of currently-featured content. If the current universe of content is exactly what users want, that’s great. But it’s usually not, in which case rearranging it is at least partially akin to playing with the ratio of sardines to prunes. By all means, use Web analytics to determine what content is being used the most (and least), but don’t stop there. To use the analogy one final time, it’s time to think about energy bars and chips in your machine.
Talk to Users - Again!
Take the information from Web analytics and return to your users: the employees and other users of your intranet. If analytics data shows that certain sections of the intranet are much more accessed, users may want more information on those topics. But again, be careful not to restrict yourself to the universe of content that accumulated during the intranet build-out. Ask users what they would like to see online that they currently keep on Post-Its next to their desk. Toral Contractor, NavigationArts’ Director of User Research, had these tips in her May 2008 article, “Understanding the Customer Experience with User Research”:
“[…] if you are redesigning your intranet, talk with your employees at their desks and observe the paper or documents that they have printed out for easy access. See what notes or “cheat” sheets they have around to help them be a little more efficient. These observations may help you discover the most important links on a page or how to format a table to allow your users to scan the page for important information more quickly.”
Returning to users during a content revision phase in an intranet project is useful because intranets tend to obfuscate initial research. Many intranet users either a) have little experience with intranets and cannot imagine everything they might want to access, or b) are used to a subpar intranet and have developed a condition similar to learned helplessness in which they cannot think about what is possible content-wise because all they want is an intranet that consolidates the five they are using now and features a working search field. Once users are presented with a usable intranet platform that meets many, if not all, of their initial requests, it is much easier for them to imagine what they might like that would help them increase their productivity, decrease their stress, or both.
Conclusion
Most companies should know their employees extremely well. After all, the company knows its employees’ working conditions, their responsibilities, and the technology at their disposal. And in case a company has doubts about who its employees are or what they want, employees happen to be one of the most captive and accessible user groups possible. Therefore despite years of bad intranets, the potential exists for a company to not only build a usable intranet framework – which appears to be an increasing trend – but to research the needs of its employees both before and after building that framework and meet those needs with relevant and timely content.
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