Discussing the length of the intranet homepage
Categorised under: Intranets, Usability & user-centered design
Some while back I posted an article which asked the question: how long should the intranet homepage be? I then discused what attractive intranets look like, providing examples of modern designs, including some long homepages.
This generated some discussion and debate. Most recently, it has led Toby Ward to write some passionate posts about the length of the homepage. He started by stating that employees demand a clean home page, no scrolling, saying:
Your employees demand a clean, white home page, with absolutely no scrolling. This is a fact, supported by dozens of employee focus groups, at dozens of leading, and medium size organizations in North America.
Toby then followed this up with speed kills on roads; lack of speed kills the intranet, including:
The problem with designers, not all designers, but many of them, is that they’re trained in creative and web design. The intranet is not a website. Let me repeat: THE INTRANET IS NOT A WEBSITE! The same creative concepts for the web, and marketing driven websites, don’t always apply to the intranet.
Be warned, these are robust articles, stating strong opinions!
Intranets aren’t short of opinions, from staff, stakeholders, consultants and experts. As I discuss in eight intranet design mistakes, it’s important not to fall into the trap of “design by opinion”. I also commented at an intranet workshop yesterday:
There are plenty of statements made about design and usability. The simpler they are, the more likely they are to be wrong.
This includes classics like the “3-click rule”, and “7+/-2″. The “homepage should never scroll” falls into this trap.
Toby seems to have based his design decisions on what staff say they want. This is like asking people “do you want more or less crime”, and being surprised at the outcome. (Task-based usability testing wasn’t amongst Toby’s list of techniques.)
There is clearly a “traditional” approach to intranet homepages that squeezes everything into a single screen. This features news, with navigation at the top, quick links on the side, and a few tools. Considering how often staff complain they can’t find anything, we have to question whether this is the best approach.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying long homepages are definitively the right way to go. But I do want intranet teams to step back and to take a fresh look at how to design their sites.
What am I sure of is that it’s hard to deliver a truly useful homepage in just a single screen. There’s simply not enough space to provide more than basic information and navigation. So if we can design long homepages that are also usable, that opens up a new world of opportunities to deliver better sites.
So let’s get away from “right” and “wrong”. Let’s instead:
- Fully research staff needs, going beyond surveys and focus groups that only gather opinions.
- Take a robust user-centred approach to intranet design that includes techniques such as usability testing.
- Avoid opinions and assumptions wherever possible.
- Keep an open mind on the best design for each situation.
- Focus on delivering an intranet that works well for staff, and delivers concrete benefits for the organisation.
Intranet teams are already experimenting with new approaches, and I’ve featured a number of them in my upcoming book on intranet design. I look forward to further innovation, testing and refinement.
What are your thoughts on this topic?
James Robertson is the Managing Director of
12 Comments:
Many employees prefer a no scroll homepage for the intranet except they are online savy. They expect to see all information and only that information that is relevant (what they think is relevant for them).
Many employees accept and like internet homepages they have to scroll but in the intranet they want everything on one no scroll page to get their job done as fast as possible.
But the more online savvy employees are the more they look for content that gives them insights they normally don’t get (“weak ties content”).
But that’s only my opinion because of what I observe in one company… other company, other people
@Frank, interesting observations!
One of the big differences between intranets and websites is that staff will become more familiar with the intranet, than casual visitors to the website.
Over time, if there is sufficient benefit to doing so, staff will learn how the intranet works. This makes at-a-glance usability less significant, and gives the opportunity to build up intranet expertise amongst all staff, whether they are web-savvy or not.
Of course, if the intranet design sucks, users will give up long before they learn how to use it effectively.
The no-scroll intranet home page is perhaps a nice place to start but quite quickly intranet managers and users start to realise that it is less usable than a page that scrolls. The BBC News homepage is a 3.5 page scroll but I use it so often I had to check what the scroll length was for the purposes of this comment.
My own experience with intranet upgrades seems to indicate that users tend to want a no-scroll home page when that was the case with the previous intranet. In over ten years of intranet consulting I have learned at least one lesson and that is not to rush to judge an intranet home page on a heuristic basis of colour, layout, scrolling etc.
When you get down to the user research there are always many more problems to fix with the rest of the site than there are with the home page, and fixing these problems always has more impact on business operations than any degree of cosmetic surgery on the home page.
James –
Thanks for sharing your perspectives on this issue. Very well stated.
I think you’ve hit on the main point: “best practice” is what works best for the people of your organization. Focus on serving these people, on how they work, and on what they aspire to achieve — individually and as an organization.
I enjoy meeting my counterparts at other organizations, and seeing their intranets, but I rarely attempt to mimic what they do… just as I would not expect them to mimic what I do.
Here’s a thought (although not necessarily novel or intelligent, but consider the source!): your intranet should always reflect the people and purpose of your organization. Thus, every intranet is unique, and the only best practice that matters is the one listed above.
I’ve always questioned placement of “news” on the home-page – it is so often a management/HR ego thing. If it must be there, have an ‘already read’ flag and on subsequent visits, don’t redisplay it.
The other crucial technical design issue is to have sub-pages ‘book-markable’, so that the ‘home-page’ can be bypassed altogether. I have a book-marks sub-folder of just the intranet sub-pages I need – my own ‘home-page’!
The scroll or not to scroll debate is always a lively and sometimes emotional one and I welcome the chance to share my thoughts on the subject.
In an ideal world we could design an Intranet homepage that requires no scrolling and contains every single component that anyone could wish for. That is of course if you know exactly what your organisation expects to have on the homepage both now and also 4 years into the future. The organisation I work for is constantly evolving and as such its information delivery requirements have changed also. Many times over the past few years I have found that some things that were an absolute priority to have on the homepage in 2007 are no longer viewed as important as the latest major project.
I have a policy in place that says for an item to be made available to all users from the homepage it must be relevant to the entire organisation. Items for specific divisional or project groups will go into an existing or newly created sub section. This works for me, my users and my organisation. This may not be the same for other organisations but I do not manage their Intranets, I manage mine and whatever I do is taylored specifically for the users in my organisation.
We are pretty lucky in 2010 in that many SOE standard screen resolutions are now 1280 x 1024. This is huge when compared to the 800 x 600 that was available when I first started out as an Intranet manager. With the added space to work with I have been currently been able to fit everything in and keep everyone happy for the time being.
We have however in the past, when standard screen resolution was 1024 x 768, had to put homepage items below the fold. When this was the case I found that by regularly communicating to users that certain items may have to be scolled for, they find it.
Just this week I was lucky enough to get a live demonstration of the NSW Department of Aging, Disability and Home Care (DADHC) Intranet. I was very interested to see that the section they have on their homepage for job vacancies and training was below the fold and users had to scroll down to access the links. Later in the discussion we were told that the Job Vacancies section was consistently the most popular section on the Intranet. Imagine, something that users have to scroll for being the most accessed. Has the world gone topsy turvey?
I firmly believe that if there is an item on your homepage that is of use and interest to your users but happens to be below the fold they need to be told where it is then reminded where it is, then reminded again until everyone knows.
I also firmly believe that all organisations and users are different and there may be some out there who will not scroll. For those I have no advise because so far in my reasonable lengthy career as an Intranet manager I have yet to come across any.
@Graeme, agree that we need to do some more work on the news elements of intranets! If we are going to put it front-and-centre, we should definitely design it with “already read” features, filtering and targeting, commenting, etc.
See my earlier thoughts on this:
http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/seeking-a-better-design-for-intranet-news/
We recently migrated to a newer version of the intranet software we run. I took the opportunity to redesign the layout of the homepage and did user testing to see what people thought should be on there.
Whilst, yes, everyone wanted the most important stuff at the top, it took two or three pages of scrolling before people started to comment that some stuff was *too* far down. I agree that as people are almost never ‘new’ users to your intranet homepage, if they know that content is further down and it’s useful to them, they’ll scroll (some distance) to see it.
Mark, great to hear your experiences, and glad to see you did some practical testing. I think that people have been unhappy with *badly designed* long pages, consisting of miles of old news, and little else. I’m pleased to hear that your users were prepared to scroll for useful stuff!
Well said James. In the end I believe it comes down to trust. If your employees trust that the content on the intranet home page is current, relative, and of intrinsic interest to them – they will scroll. If your home page doesn’t hold any real value, and you have old outdated information that they can’t rely on, they won’t scroll to see what could be of interest below the fold.
The non-scroll page phobia comes from the “old days” when people were not very used to using web sites, mouses and scroll bars.
How many of the top web site today have non-scroll home pages?
I find the “non-scroll” principle very dated, and not at all in line with people’s experiences and expectations today.
Of course, there is still the battle for being at the top of the page! Why is that? Are we afraid the “busy people” will click away to reach what they “really need”?
If that’s the case, what’s wrong with our home pages?
@Jane, agree that the “above the fold” issue is often more to do with stakeholder desires for visibility rather than solid usability concerns. As you’ve been saying for a while now, good governance is key to cutting through these competing priorities to find a workable common ground…