Don’t put the weather on the intranet homepage
Categorised under: Intranets
A common enhancement to intranets is to add some sort of weather information to the homepage. This could be an icon showing the current temperature, through to a full 5-day forecast showing projected temperatures, rainfall and humidity.
What is surprising is how much passion this topic generates when it comes up at intranet gatherings. Invariably, some will strongly argue for this feature, while others will be staunchly opposed.
Personally, I’m not a fan.
The hopes
Adding weather is a high priority for some organisations:
- Increased traffic to the intranet. Weather is often looked up by staff on the public web, so usage can be increased by bringing it onto the intranet.
- More engaging (’sticky’) intranet. By providing a real-time or interactive feature such as the weather, staff will be encouraged to repeatedly return to the intranet.
- Flow-on benefits. Once staff visit the intranet to check the weather, they may read the latest news or browse the site.
- It’s fun. Staff want to know the weather, and it’s something more interesting to add to the site than policies and procedures.
- Quick win. Adding the weather to the homepage is a quick improvement that shows that the site is being improved, generating (or sustaining) staff interest.
The realities
In practice, however:
- Not interesting enough. By itself, the weather is unlikely to be important enough to convince staff to visit the intranet more frequently.
- Looking out the window. In most cases, staff can look out a window if they want to see what the weather is like.
- Few business benefits. What tangible benefits are being delivered by adding the weather onto the intranet homepage?
- ‘Sticky’ is so 90’s. The intranet will be used if it’s useful. The concept of making a website ’sticky’ (encouraging repeat visits) was questionable a decade ago, and even less relevant for intranets.
- Increasing intranet usage is not important. There is no real benefit in increasing intranet use for the sake of it, and staff should be left to use the site when it’s useful for them.
- Tricking people into visiting the intranet. You can’t really ‘trick’ staff into visiting the intranet for some novelty (weather, news, sports scores) and then expect there to be real flow-on benefits for the rest of the site.
- Bigger issues to tackle. Most intranets have much more significant issues to address, such as search or navigation, making the weather a very low priority.
Side note
The weather may be useful in in a large, geographically dispersed organisation. For example:
- Providing an online tool to find out the weather in another office, in preparation for a business trip. Could potentially be linked in with a timezone display.
- Including the weather in an ‘office locator’ feature on the intranet (such as the Gold Award entry from Syngenta in this year’s Intranet Innovation Awards).
Note that both these options go beyond a simple weather box on the homepage.
Summary
There’s probably no real harm in including the weather on the homepage, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of more important features. Consider it a low priority, however, and focus on more important improvements to the usability or usefulness of the intranet homepage.
(PS. If general staff don’t have access to the public web at work, this is a bigger issue. Address this directly, rather than adding features such as the weather to the homepage.)
Where do you stand on this debate?
Tags: Intranets
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 
12 Comments:
I’d add one more reason. Home page real estate is valuable and the room that weather takes up is probably better invested elsewhere (even if it is more whitespace).
As a user, I don’t see the value in such a feature but note that many colleagues do. We included the weather on our intranet but months after making that decision, I am inclined to think the real estate could have been better utilised.
We had weather on our main page for years and dropped it early this year. There were some folks–mostly from manufacturing with no internet access–that complained, but it’s long forgotten now. For those folks, I created a page on our main wiki that pulls in RSS feeds for the current weather. Judging by the hits, it looks like at least a few people use it.
For the rest, there are too many sites and widgets for weather info. There’s no reason to waste valuable real estate on it.
I fully endorse all that’s been said.
I have trouble dealing with evaluating the business priorities of requests by content contributors competing for their share of the real estate.
We have had to resort to drawing up an editorial map that includes every inch of every aspect of the available communication channels e.g. the intranet & website home pages, email footers, internal & external newsletters, even the ticker on the TV in the lift lobby.
Like those who request new discussion forums, the people likely to be asking for the weather details might refer to it once, but then go back to their BOM bookmark thereafter.
Thanks, John
I’ll have to be the dissenting voice on this one, but do so with a caveat. Weather can be a useful application on a homepage, as long as its relevant, necessary, and important.
My organisation works in the Government environment/timber space, and weather is one of the most important user applications we provide particularly around fire season. It provides at-a-glance knowledge of what’s happened in relevant areas and hotspots and enables users, particularly those who form part of state fire teams, to use the information as an indicator for planning their week.
However, whenever someone asks me if something could be included on a homepage, or in fact anywhere within an intranet, always goes back to the three key questions:
1) Is it useful for a majority of the cohort group accessing that specific resource?
2) Can it be maintained/updated enough to be of continual use?
3) Will they actually use it frequently enough to justify its existence?
If the answer is no to any of those questions, your request doesn’t even get off the drawing board.
I agree with Michael. As long as the criteria is relevance, necessity and importance, then add what you need on your intranet homepage, including weather.
In this part of the world (Denmark), I would say that weather does meet the criteria in our many farming organisations, but less so in other organisations, e.g. banks or pharma.
On a related note: I’ve had similar heated debates when it comes to the famous stock quote ticker on the intranet homepage. This may not be fun to follow at the moment, but certainly meets the criteria, but can also be quite a distraction.
I guess when youre struggling for content to include on an Intranet you’ll end up banging any old widget, gadget or whatever up there. At least the weather is kept current! Some of the content on sites, like forms etc are so out of date that if the weather followed suit we’d be in the ice age!
Jason
I a recent intranet design project, we *did* recommend including the weather, but not on the home page.
The organization has offices in 4 cities in the US and many employees frequently traveled between them. There were pages for each location, which included temporary office availability and signup, contact information for critical services, the cafeteria menus, local housing options, and the local 10-day weather forecasts.
The traveling employees told us they found these resources invaluable for trip planning.
Excellent points. Maybe it depends on where you live, but here in the Dallas area… the weather is changing by the hour. I’d like to know if I need a heavier coat or no sweatshirt before I step outside.
I have a weather app on my BlackBerry — so it displays the temp on the bottom of the screen. That’s it. So why not have one little line showing “## degrees”?
Then again, maybe the entire org should just get weather apps for their phones and not use the intranet.
Sometimes the social aspects of the organisation also need to be considered.
Employees are humans too, and need non-work things to break up the stress of their jobs.
It’s often the small things that count. When we survey our staff, often what they like most about our intranet is our use of different headers for special occasions – ala Google.
If it is as simple as adding weather on the intranet, then the loss of a small amount of real estate is a small price to pay for increased employee engagement and a more comfortable working place.
If you’re looking for direct business benefits, consider employee retention and job satisfaction. It may be hard to measure the intranet’s contribution, but think about what makes people loyal to a hotel chain, a rental car company or a brand.
It’s the details that matter.
Like anything, there’s a right and wrong way to do it, and most people do it the wrong way. I stand by the author’s choice for the title, and I say that anyone who knows what they’re doing well enough to do it correctly and justify why should go for it.
I’ve seen too many giant embedded weather iframes and images with tons of branding for the info provider or even ads. Ridiculous! Find a feed that gives you 20 characters of basic info, and stick that in an out of the way corner using server-side code and cached data on the server without an extra http request.
As expected, this has generated a lot of discussion!
I agree with the consensus that seems to be emerging:
If adding weather to the intranet is directly *useful*, then definitely do it.
Otherwise, it may be beneficial for cultural or branding reasons, but don’t allocate the most valuable real-estate to it.
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