p>Redesigning a well-established intranet involves major cultural change. For anything beyond the smallest of tweaks or incremental changes, reshaping the intranet will have an impact on business areas, content owners, authors, and end users (staff). One of the most common mistakes made by intranet teams is to push forward on site ...
Monthly Archives: June 2010
June 30, 2010
Build support before an intranet redesign
Categorised under: Intranets, James' articles
June 30, 2010
Rolling out intranet access from home
Many organisations have staff who don't sit at desks or in front of PCs. The challenge is how to give them access to the intranet, so they can easily complete common tasks, such as applying for leave. Several approaches were outlined in the earlier article Intranet kiosks or remote access?. ...
Categorised under: Intranets, James' articles
Tags: Intranets, remote access
June 30, 2010
Enhancing the intranet with game theory
Compelling, creative, addictive and a key tool in improving employee engagement. This isn't the way most intranet managers would describe their sites. But that could all be about to change. The use of game theory and gaming mechanics in business application development is intensifying day by day, and there are ...
Categorised under: Intranets
Tags: Collaboration, game theory, Intranets
June 29, 2010
Many ways of creating a compelling intranet business case
Business cases can be boring. Following a corporate template, the pre-defined gaps are filled in with standard text, and the document goes to whatever committee has to sign it off. Before jumping straight into this, intranet teams can benefit from stepping back to look at the many ways a business ...
Categorised under: Intranets, Metrics & ROI
Tags: business cases, Intranets, storytelling, strategy
June 25, 2010
5 enterprise 2.0 myth mantras that must die
Thomas Vander Wal has written about five enterprise 2.0 myths, as follows: It is believed that it is the Millennials (those recently out of university and roughly 22 to 27 years old) that are expecting or demanding these social tools. Often people make the link from Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0 ...
Categorised under: Enterprise 2.0
Tags: Enterprise 2.0
June 25, 2010
Aligning the intranet business case against strategic priorities
A few weeks ago we ran an intranet strategy workshop for a major bank, helping them to identify approaches for their upcoming business case. Now we've been saying for a long time that strong business cases align closely with top-level organisational and strategic priorities. Beyond just "making information findable" or "creating ...
Categorised under: Intranets
Tags: business cases, Intranets, strategy
June 22, 2010
So, you want to do user research: characteristics of great researchers
Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain have written about the characteristics of great user researchers. To quote: One of the best things about user research is that anyone can do it. On the other hand, it takes real commitment and a lot of personal development to do user research well. People ...
Categorised under: Usability & user-centered design
Tags: user research
June 10, 2010
Pros and cons of remote usability testing
Nate Bolt writes about the pros and cons of remote usability testing. To quote: n-person user research used to be the only game in town, and as with most industry practices, its procedures were developed, refined, standardized, and then became entrenched in the corporate R&D product development cycle. Practically everything ...
Categorised under: Usability & user-centered design
Tags: usability testing
June 9, 2010
Multiple document silos – where to start?
Alan Pelz-Sharpe has written a post on where to start with multiple document silos. To quote: Multiple repositories can come in many different forms, be they hundreds of SharePoint sites, a handful of massive ECM systems, or a combination of shared drives and Outlook folders. But they all represent the ...
Categorised under: Information management
Tags: Information management
June 8, 2010
A taxonomy of constraints
Dan Brown has written an interesting post outlining typical project constraints, and they impact they have. To quote: Constraints are inputs into the design process that make designers are focused on solving the right problem. The design process depends on exploration and iteration, two things that can take designers further ...
Categorised under: Usability & user-centered design
Tags: constraints
June 8, 2010
8 tips for making ambush ‘guerilla user testing’ clip reel videos
Martin Belam has written a followup post on creating "guerilla user testing" videos. To quote: Yesterday I posted my 10 tips for ambush 'guerilla user testing'. Once you've got some footage of people using your website, you need to find the best way to present that back to the business. ...
Categorised under: Usability & user-centered design
Tags: usability testing
June 7, 2010
Social intranet governance
Toby Ward has written about social intranet governance. To quote: Where every organization should include specifics for social media use, if your organization does not have a separate, superfluous social media policy (that’s right, a social media policy is largely superfluous if you have proper governance and content / editorial ...
Categorised under: Enterprise 2.0, Intranets
Tags: governance, Intranets, social media, social software
June 7, 2010
10 tips for ‘ambush guerilla user testing’
Martin Belam has written a post on "ambush guerilla user testing". To quote: Over the last couple of years I've been practicing 'ambush guerilla user testing', which is basically the art of pouncing on lone people in cafes and public spaces, and quickly filming them whilst they use a website ...
Categorised under: Usability & user-centered design
Tags: usability testing
