Also called guided navigation and faceted search, the faceted navigation model leverages metadata fields and values to provide users with visible options for clarifying and refining queries. Faceted navigation is arguably the most significant search innovation of the past decade.[2] It features an integrated, incremental search and browse experience that lets users begin with a classic keyword search and then scan a list of results. It also serves up a custom map (usually to the left of results) that provides insights into the content and its organization and offers a variety of useful next steps.

This organisation was previously structured by market units (roughly equivalent to countries) and business units, but with the size of customers growing, a decision was made to shift to a regional model. This immediately raised some important questions about the intranet.

On the current intranet, there is a global site, market unit sites, individual country sites and business unit sites. What should role should these now play?

With the creation of regions, there is a natural assumption that regional intranets will be required, but what should go on them? The default approach was to replicate the existing market unit sites to create the regional sites, but it quickly became clear that this didn’t make sense.

What should staff have as their homepage? How will global and local news be distributed?

What is needed is a clear and concrete sense of the overall intranet model. This defines the shape of the intranet, and the role of individual sites and sections. This could be very simple from a technology standpoint, or make extensive use of personalisation and segmentation.

This is something that we’ve written about before, and Jane McConnell has also covered it extensively.

The intranet model is not easy to work out, and we’ve seen many intranet teams avoid the challenge. Instead, overly simplistic models are put in place that work poorly for both the organisation and staff.

It’s not just global multinationals that have this challenge. We’re starting work with an Australian government agency formed by the merger of previous departments, and they need to work this out. We’ve also been engaged by the Australian arm of a global company, and this is their central challenge to resolve.

We’re now including several days in our intranet projects specifically to work out the intranet model. As these projects unfold, we’ll share our insights and solutions.

What approaches have you taken to delivering intranets in the scenario outlined above?

I going to try and impugn one of the great concepts of content management: metadata. I’m going to argue that in the world of Web content management (WCM), it doesn’t really exist. Well, it might, but if it does, it’s awfully slippery to define and defining it doesn’t give you much value anyway.

As we started experimenting with “card-based classification” on paper, it became clear that, while the technique was simple, it was tedious to create the cards on paper, recruit participants, record the results manually, and enter the data into a spreadsheet for analysis. The steps were easy enough, but they were time eaters.

I was digging around in my files this weekend and found this table I made once of different approaches to applying metadata to content. At first glance the volunteers example looks like it is only relevant to charities but alot of scenarios that refer to users tagging, it is actually volunteers tagging. The difference is doing something for your own benefit (users) or contributing something to a greater cause (volunteers).

Last week I was talking to someone about enterprise wiki adoption. I ended up sketching a rough diagram like this so we could talk about the need to design (in an active, participatory sense) social computing environments that provide enough information scaffolding so that users can be productive at the beginning but that also allow emergent, socially negotiated information structures and usage patterns to develop over time.

This is where the concept of “triangulation” comes into its own. Also known as “mixed method” research, triangulation is the act of combining several research methods to study one thing. They overlap each other somewhat, being complimentary at times, contrary at others. This has the effect of balancing each method out and giving a richer and hopefully truer account.

This persona format was created to organize information in the Fluid Personas. The format chosen was based on the competitive analysis of many persona examples below.

In my view the EIS must consider all instances of information and knowledge transfer that take place within an organisation. This does not mean that it is possible to actually manage all transactions. For instance the tacit knowledge inside people’s heads can be added to by training and can be influenced by organisational culture but the only manager of this type of knowledge is the person in whose head the knowledge resides. However it is possible, for instance, to consider the amount of tacit knowledge that people might need in order to do their jobs effectively. If it is too little then you are not allowing staff any control over their working environment and they will have little job satisfaction; if it is too much then the organisation may be badly affected as crucial knowledge will leave when the person does.

A good site structure makes users happy. They can easily find, understand and use the information on your site. For the business, this makes all the difference. In this article I’ll go through principles behind good site structures and describe a methodology for creating site structures.

If you’ve made it this far, you deserve a reward. That’s a lot of words about a lot of deliverables. And, that’s the problem. It’s hard to find the best trees when we can’t see the forest. So, we often fall back on old habits. We churn out wireframes when a story may be worth its weight in gold. Some great deliverables stay hidden in plain sight. That’s why we created this treasure map for our wall (and yours).

The top 25 search terms accounted for half of all searches. The top 50 terms accounted for 75% of all searches made.

We tried searching for the top 10 terms, including “training”, “expenses”, “ariel” (the BBC in-house weekly newspaper) and “jobs”. The results were worrying to say the least. Few of them returned the result expected on the first page of search results.

Where would we be without rating and reputation systems these days? Take them away, and we wouldn’t know who to trust on eBay, what movies to pick on Netflix, or what books to buy on Amazon. Reputation systems (essentially a rating system for people) also help guide us through the labyrinth of individuals who make up our social web. Is he or she worthwhile to spend my time on? For pity’s sake, please don’t check out our reputation points before deciding whether to read this article.

Information Architecture Television is a weblog that contains quite an extensive collection of online videos concerning usability, information architecture, interaction design and user experience design.

[Thanks to putting people first.]

Portals gather and present content from a wide variety of sources, making the assembled items and streams more valuable for users by reducing the costs of content discovery and acquisition. By placing diverse content into close proximity, specialized forms of portals, such as the dashboard, support knowledge workers in creative and interpretive activities including synthesis, strategy formulation, decision making, collaboration, knowledge production, and multi-dimensional analysis.