The classic texts of project management outline the importance of initial planning and design activities. While they only consist of 10-30% of the project, they lay the groundwork for everything to come. This is no different in the world of SharePoint intranets. Quite the contrary: ...
Articles tagged: usability
Tree testing for effective navigation
'I can't find what I am looking for' is one of the most common complains staff make about intranet content. Contributing to this issue is poor search, and poorly named or simply missing material. However, most often, the issue comes down to poor site structure and a lack of good ...
Card sorting: online versus offline
Card sorting is a common technique within user-centred design (UCD) methodologies. It's also an activity that can polarise opinions; people either believe in it, or think it's a waste of time. There are many articles and blog posts out there that measure the value of this UCD technique. This article ...
Mobile devices are personal devices (and what this means for enterprise apps)
People consider their mobile phone to be one of their key personal possessions, never far from their body. Psychologically, they are personal devices, in a way that is very different from desktop computers or other home electronics. This is shown in the way that the current crop of mobile applications are ...
Jargon test your intranet
Jargon is generally language that applies to a particular trade, profession or group of people. Within organisations jargon can be like secret shorthand, with many variations, including abbreviations, made-up words and acronyms. Who has ever been on a Genesis project or had to go to a meeting in the CQ ...
Targeting enterprise search to key tasks
Enterprise search is often deployed as 'the answer' for the difficulties of finding information across an entire organisation. The basic concept is that the enterprise search indexes 'everything', and findability problems are solved. In practice, teams given the task of designing and deploying enterprise search find these projects much more complex. ...
Creating effective intranet “shop windows”
Intranets must be productive and easy to use if they are to be successful. As outlined in the earlier article Why staff visit the intranet, there are two things that bring staff to the intranet: to find a specific piece of information to complete a task In both cases, staff come to the ...
Should intranet links open in a new window?
It is often the small things that are the most contentious in a community. As a vigorous debate on the LinkedIn 'Intranet Professionals' group showed, "should links open in a new window?" is one such topic. While these discussions echo the policies established for public-facing websites, intranets may require very different ...
Global launch of Designing intranets: creating sites that work
We've been working on this all year, so I'm pleased to be able to finally announce that Designing intranets: creating sites that work is now available for purchase globally. With four times the content of our last book, What every intranet team should know, this is ...
Discussing the length of the intranet homepage
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 ...
What attractive intranets look like
The winds of change are blowing for intranets. Every intranet survey run in the wider community has shown that 50% of intranet teams are planning (or hoping) to redesign their sites. With any redesign comes the opportunity for a fresh new look and feel. Drawing their inspiration from the best of ...
Identifying staff tasks
Intranets are most useful when they help staff do their jobs. This includes finding a key piece of information (‘what is the address for our interstate office?’) or completing a process online (‘I need to apply for some leave over Christmas’). The best approach for helping staff is to focus on ...
How long should the intranet homepage be?
Intranet homepages are always contentious. In most organisations, every stakeholder would like a piece of this valuable real estate, and debates rage around the overall purpose and design. Within the intranet industry, the homepage also inflames passionate debate. This is particularly true on the question of how long the intranet homepage ...
Reworking the HR section
Mark Tilbury shares his experiences and approaches to redesigning the HR section of his intranet. To quote: Finally getting a stakeholder session with our HR guys and owners of 'people' related content on our intranet. Negotiations over the process and protocols have been as torturous as organising the Nixon/Frost debates, ...
Eight intranet design mistakes
Intranet projects are challenging at the best of times. Sites are large and content rich. Project teams are often thrown into the deep end, with many constraints and expectations. Intranet projects may confront challenges such as: unclear intranet ownership and governance tight timeframes limited (and often insufficient) budgets varied (and sometimes competing) stakeholder opinions large number ...
The myth of the occasional CMS user
Seth Gottlieb challenges the idea of the occasional CMS user when rolling out a new solution. To quote: Often, one of the big justifications for a CMS is removing the webmaster bottleneck and delegating content entry to the people who have the information. The implicit assumption is that everyone wants ...
The three clicks myth
When designing intranets or websites, it is helpful to have some rules of thumb to follow when making decisions. Over time, many of these have become elevated into principles or rules, widely used throughout the industry. The best-known is the 'three clicks rule', which says that all content should be no ...
Sketchy wireframes
Aaron Travis writes about the benefits of making wireframes look rough. To quote: When it comes to user interface documentation, wireframes have long been the tool of choice. However, using traditional diagramming tools like Visio, OmniGraffle, and InDesign, most wireframes today look the same as their ancestors did from a ...
A day on intranet design with Victorian councils
Last Friday I spent the day in Melbourne, running an Intranet Design + Redesign workshop for local councils. The in-house workshop was organised by one council, and with other councils invited to join the session. We ended up with about 24 people in the room representing 15 different councils ...
The value of drop-in labs
Jeni Cram has written on the the value of drop-in labs when launching a new CMS. To quote: Drop-in labs are a great way to make the rollout process smoother. A drop-in lab is simply a set time where you invite users to a working session with staff on hand ...
Inexpensive ways to target problem areas
Todd Elliott has written an article on remote usability techniques. To quote: Until fairly recently, when designers wanted to test an idea or design, they sought out an outside usability agency or, rented a room, some expensive equipment and recruited users to come into an artificial environment to participate in ...
Seven roles of the intranet homepage
There is no more contested or challenging page on the intranet than the homepage. As it is the most visible page on the site, everyone wants their piece of the homepage. There is also contention about the role of the intranet homepage: Should the homepage be mostly about news? Is navigation the ...
Ready for the world-premier in London of our “Intranet design + redesign” workshop
Phew! It's been a busy week, and I'm glad to finally be on a plane to Europe. One of the bigger projects was putting the finishing touches to our brand-new Intranet design + redesign workshop. I've been running intranet strategy workshops for years now. They've run in over a dozen countries ...
How to combine multiple research methods: practical triangulation
Patrick Kennedy has written an article on using triangulation in user research projects. To quote: 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, ...
Brand new workshop: intranet design + redesign (Sydney, 21 October 2009)
We've been working with intranet teams for years now, as well as writing articles and running workshops around the globe. Something that's been on our to-do list for ages now has been to create ...
What is an experience strategy?
Steve Baty answers the question: what is an experience strategy? To quote: We often discuss the need for us to be designing for an experience. And we talk about the importance of experience design - and design generally - playing a strategic role in business decisions. But we’re less forthcoming ...
Paper prototyping
Shawn Medero has written an article on paper prototyping. To quote: As interfaces become ever more complex and development schedules seem to get shorter and shorter, you may find it useful to give up your user-interface modeling software for awhile in favor of something simpler. All you need is paper, ...
Real or imaginary: the effectiveness of using personas in product design
Frank Long has published a research paper on the effectiveness of personas. To quote: The use of personas as a method for communicating user requirements in collaborative design environments is well established. However, very little research has been conducted to quantify the benefits of using this technique. The aim of ...
No designer is an island
Sarah B. Nelson talks about the role of collaboration in design. To quote: When I suggest collaborative design to some designers, I often hear, “Yuck! Collaboration is just design by committee!” They aren’t wrong. Poorly facilitated collaboration can kill a design project and demoralize a team. But the truth is, ...
Beware of using opinions to design an intranet
I've just settled back in from my most recent conference tour, and I've spent a lot of time talking with intranet teams from a wide variety of organisations, across three continents. Based on the types of approaches I've seen to intranet designs, I'm going to state: Beware of using opinions to ...
Writing usability requirements and metrics
Janet M. Six has written an article on writing usability requirements and metrics. To quote: I think we overemphasize metrics when it comes to usability. They often introduce problems in terms of the validity and reliability of the data. First, ask whether a metric is a valid measure of usability. ...
User experience treasure map
Peter Morville has posted about a new User Experience Treasure Map, created in collaboration with Jeffery Callender. To quote: 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 ...
Google details results of eye tracking study
ReadWriteWeb reports on the results of a Google eye tracking study into search. To quote: Google posted an update about its eye tracking usability studies today. Most of the results are not exactly groundbreaking. It is, for example, no surprise that most users only scan the first couple of search ...
Improving your first page of search results
Gerry McGovern has written about improving your first page of search results. To quote: "Search is now normal behavior. What do we do about that?" is the to-the-point title of an excellent study of search behavior on the UK Open University website. Among the many practical recommendations it gives is ...
Starting from zero: winning strategies for no search results pages
Greg Nudelman discusses designing search results pages when there are zero results. To quote: The typical product team has no coherent strategy for cases when there are no search results. Most teams spend the bulk of their design phase working on the search results pages for a successful search. Then, ...
17 usability tips to make your CMS rock
Patrick Kennedy has posted a superb article containing 17 usability tips to make your CMS rock. To quote: More than likely your content management system (CMS) will have many usability problems if you just use it “out of the box”. Having been involved in a number of projects tasked with ...
Stop calling it usability testing
Patrick Kennedy writes about the confusion surrounding usability testing. To quote: The term “usability testing” often gets misconstrued by technical types, project managers and business analysts. It gets turned into a stale, rigid, bureaucratic affair. The old “unit, integration, system” mantra. It’s done as a matter of course, at the ...
Practical ways to assess CMS usability
The usability of a content management system is paramount. If authors and site owners can't work out how to use the CMS, you've got nothing. The CMS can have all the functionality in the world, but usability trumps it all. I've written about this before, outlining 11 usability principles for ...
Selling UX
Daniel Szuc, Paul J. Sherman, and John S. Rhodes have written an article on selling user experience (UX) within organisations. To quote: At some point in your career, you’ll be called upon to sell UX to someone in your organization. You’ve probably already done it. Perhaps you’ll need to justify ...
25 reasons why saving time on your intranet is a bad metric
We've all heard the argument: if we can save staff 2 minutes a day looking for information on the intranet, we can multiply this out by the number of staff and the days in the year to get a huge productivity benefit. This can then be used to justify the ...
Asking participants to “pretend” in user studies
Jared Spool has written about the dangers of getting users to pretend during usability testing. To quote: One of the places we kept noticing this was when we watching people shop online. Asking a shopper to pretend to purchase (“Could you find a pair of shoes you might like to ...
Quick turnaround usability testing
Paul Nuschke writes about quick turnaround usability testing techniques. To quote: It starts with any number of scenarios: Design and development have taken too long to produce a prototype, you need to release in three weeks, and you suspect there may be design flaws. You are trying to incorporate usability ...
Simplify the search user experience
Out of the box, most search engines are poorly designed for the needs of general intranet searchers. Cluttered with complex features, these search tools can easily be overwhelming for staff who simply want search to work ‘like Google’. The first step that the intranet team should take when installing a new ...
