How did intranet homepages become so static?
Categorised under: Enterprise 2.0, Intranets, Usability & user-centered design
Something strange has happened to intranet homepages. Despite the diversity of staff needs and activities, intranets have ended up with a fixed, static and unreactive homepage that only targets generic requirements.
Having fought so hard to balance competing stakeholder demands, intranet teams are often relieved to lock down the homepage. Functionality doesn’t change over time, and the homepage is often the slowest page to evolve.
In reaction to this, some intranets moved to an entirely “personalised” view, giving staff complete freedom on what “portlets” to include. This approach also works poorly, with only 5-10% of staff taking up personalisation functionality.
What’s needed is a middle ground, where the intranet homepage is more flexible, people-centric, and proactive.
The mock screenshot above, created for my intranets in 2015 presentations, shows one possible — and very simple — example. New starters are provided with information directly for them, with a low-key way of dismissing the feature when they’re done with it. The homepage starts as being tailored for the new starter, and then evolves as their needs change.
There are many other possibilities:
- Tools targeted or tailored for key staff groups or business units.
- Global and local news, with the ability to choose what news is displayed.
- Task list that is displayed only when there are outstanding tasks to complete.
- Simple mechanisms for tweaking how the homepage works.
- Small business applications, directly on the homepage.
- “Seasonal” changes to the homepage, in response to key deadlines, activities and events.
All of this should be simple, low-key, and frictionless. Like the websites that we use routinely, we should take for granted that we can interact in a two-way fashion with intranets, without having to be techies or power users.
What have your experiences been? How can we make our homepages more reactive and responsive?
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 
2 Comments:
Hi James,
I think you’re absolutely right that homepages are often static … however, doesn’t this largley reflect their purpose? For example, in large, complex organisations, homepages are signposts to the places where people can find or do stuff. Is it realistic to expect people to actually ‘do’ anything on an enterprise-wide homepage?
The danger of trying to make a homepage interactive is that it either becomes very busy and complex (with lots of user configuration options which are never used) or it offers a set of second-rate functions which are actually better performed in the ‘native’ application elsewhere on the intranet.
My experience of an effective homepage is of a ‘launch’ page which is built around a set of intuitive, action-oriented pointers to the places where I can find what I’m looking for or do what I need to do – ideally, all one or two clicks away.
Not sure what others think?
Regards,
Richard
@Richard, definitely agree that homepages need to be a “known” starting point for staff, and that they shouldn’t change too much. That being said, with a hugely diverse range of staff (particularly in large organisations), we do need to question how well our static homepages meet real needs. What I’m interested in exploring is “low-key” features, rather than a big-bang portal interface, or similar…