Post 5 of 10 in a series of blog posts giving more insight into this year’s Intranet Innovation Award winners.

Prophet is a US-based global consultancy with a customer base of Fortune 500 companies.

Prophet’s online performance evaluation and appraisal system is an automated, centralised, dashboard system that takes an often cumbersome, time-consuming process and streamlines and automates it, creating a super-fast, super-easy feedback system that’s made life dramatically easier for all involved, whether requesting and gathering feedback, or ensuring all applicable staff members are contributing to the process.

The first step in designing the process was to automate the actual feedback request process. Leveraging information about project teams already maintained on the intranet, feedback requests are now automatically sent to people worked with during the review period. It’s a lot of feedback requests, but it’s more inclusive and applicable.

The system is flexible in order to let coaches request additional feedback – for example, from people who worked with an individual, but not on an official project the intranet tracks. Coaches can send further automated ‘nudges’ to people to encourage compliance with feedback requests.

Overall, Prophet’s basic feedback workflow stayed the same. In brief:

• Coaches (aka managers/supervisors) request feedback about their coachees from appropriate colleagues.
• There’s a period of time for feedback to be gathered.
• Coaches to write reviews for their coachees (guided by the feedback).
• Finally, reviews are shared with coachees.

This is an excellent example of using the intranet to simplify and dramatically improve business processes, reducing the appraisal process time from two months to one week. It also adheres to the belief that the intranet should be a ‘place for doing things’ not just a ‘place for reading things’.

(For full details of this Award-winning entry, obtain a copy of the 198-page Intranet Innovations 2009 report.)

Post 3 of 10 in a series of blog posts giving more insight into this year’s Intranet Innovation Award winners.

IBM is one of the world’s best known technology companies, providing hardware, software and services for thousands of organisations across the globe. The company has over 390,000 employees, and mass of internal systems for staff to use. Recognising some complaints about the ease of finding various systems, a two-man team in a small business unit set about creating the w3 Toolbar – a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ for the browser, and the first intranet-focused Toolbar the Award judges had seen.

Installing the w3 toolbar for Internet Explorer (IE) or Firefox gives IBMers a range of tools.

Search and integration
With the w3 Toolbar, employees can quickly search Google, w3, BluePages, IBM’s media Library (i.e., podcasts), Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, etc. – you name it.

Bookmark and recommend
Staff can save and tag useful Web pages and easily find similar bookmarks that other employees have created, or even people who have similar interests. These bookmarks can be accessed from any computer in the world.

Staff can also recommend pages to colleagues and groups and view their own recommendations in an email digest, as a Web feed subscription, or within the toolbar itself.

The bookmarks and recommendations help IBM’s internal search system identify content that is most valuable to IBMers, improving the quality of search results for everyone.

Learning Rx and Links
Quick access to career guidance and all kinds of great resources.

IBM stock price
A quick glance at this toolbar widget shows you the current IBM stock price.

MyStuff
MyStuff gives employees quick access to their blog, profile, podcasts, shared files, essential links, tags and tagged pages, and recommendations.

BlueThx
Give and get recognition from colleagues.

File sharing
Share files with colleagues/groups with and view/ download the files shared.

News
View IBM Top Stories and subscriptions from IBM’s in-house feed reader, which helps IBMers find and stay current on the latest news and information from all their favourite Web sites, aggregating all this content in one convenient place.

This feature also helps mitigate the massive amounts of content produced and syndicated both within IBM and on the Internet, allowing employees to quickly save and share this information with others.

The w3 Toolbar is a practical, useful and innovative application for the IBM w3 intranet. Its brings together disparate systems into one easy-to-use interface, increasing productivity for intranet users, highlighting the availability of tools that may otherwise have gone unnoticed, and solves a frustrating problem many employees were experiencing.

(For full details of this Award-winning entry, obtain a copy of the 198-page Intranet Innovations 2009 report.)

Consistency is one of the golden rules of interface design. There can be no question about this. It’s important on many levels. When applied effectively in a design, consistency creates a foundation for a user to interact with the product in a predictable manner. Consistency creates usage patterns, offering users the opportunity to succeed in the face of an unknown feature encountered for the first time.

[Thanks to InfoDesign.]

Patterns help us solve design problems – problems that occur time and time again, and are being solved time and time again by designers. Patterns describe practical solutions to these problems and how to apply them in different situations.

With this Interaction Design pattern collection we are creating and extending patterns for screen design, with a focus on Interaction Design and Usability.

[Thanks to InfoDesign.]

Every paper and digital document shares three basic dimensions: structure, information and presentation. Although these dimensions are always interwoven, some people in the digital world mostly focus on document structures (e.g. information architects), some on the information they contain (e.g. marketers and writers/editors) while others specialize in the (interactive) presentation aspects (e.g. visual designers and Flash developers). The mutual dependence and interaction of these dimensions is the next level of design and does not regularly get the proper attention. In order to better understand the relationship between these dimensions, let us look at each of them separately, and how they inter-relate.

After years of creating paper prototypes and user interface schematics, Gabe began to assemble a library of commonly-used interface elements. This eliminates the need to re-create buttons, menus, windows, or fields from scratch. These interface elements mimic real, platform-specific interface standards in order to communicate a level of detail that most schematics lack. This, he found, made it easier for clients and test subjects alike to feel comfortable with designs in progress.

Gabe has now made this library available here and encourages those who are software or web designers to download, use, and expand this set of interface controls and windows.

[Thanks to reloade.]

1. Determine how you want to work together
2. Start every project with a ?contract?
3. Provide access to the right people and information
4. Be clear about constraints and trade-offs
5. Have the designers report to a top manager

[Thanks to InfoDesign.]

[Thanks to InfoDesign.]

[Thanks to Inter Alia.]

This is a useful and asthetic PDF, but be warned: it’s 6.7MB in size…

Sites re-launch all the time in spectacular fashion. But this is starting to change. Jared points out how the best design teams are slowly evolving their sites, not drastically overhauling them.

The hypertext environment of the Web presumes a style of unfettered browsing and exploration that is not particularly conducive to the full and valid completion of specific tasks, operations, or database transactions. Creating web applications that support the full and valid completion of specific tasks, operations, and database transactions, therefore requires some understanding of how to manipulate the medium to that purpose. To wit, the following few thousand words serve to describe both the fundamental building blocks of HTML-based web applications as well as the three ways in which those blocks can be arranged to provide various types of task flows.

1. Know your audience
2. Tell a story
3. Describe the rationale and implications of the design
4. Stick to a grid
5. Use the present tense, active voice
6. Get a partner

For example, has has just published some prototype interfaces (developed using DENIM) for a “homeostatic package manager” for Linux. All very cool.

[Thanks to ia/.]

The previous iteration of BBCi Search had the best links offset in a box above the tabbed interface, and we found that they were effectively in a blind spot, which is why they were moved into the run of the results.

[Thanks to High Context.]

(Site note: Martin, you need to make yourself more visible on your blog. I only found your name by discovering an e-mail address on the about page.)