Intranet usability and IA
An intranet will only be successful if staff can quickly and easily find the information they need. The intranet must be structured in a way that makes sense to staff, pages must be well designed, and search effective.
To achieve this, a user-centred design approach must be taken when designing (or redesigning) the intranet. This includes applying best-practice usability and information architecture (IA) techniques.
Fundamental principles
Intranet teams benefit from having a strong grounding in usability and information architecture principles, and these can be used throughout the lifetime of the site. Major redesigns should obviously make use of these techniques, but incremental enhancements should also be usable.
Read more:
- What is usability?
- What is information architecture?
- Introduction to web accessibility
- Information scent: helping people find the content they want
- Usability and IA are core skills for intranet teams
- Why staff visit the intranet
- How staff look for documents
Key techniques
There are a range of practical techniques that can be used when designing or redesigning the intranet. These are simple to use, quick to apply, and help to build confidence that the best solution is being delivered.
Read more:
- Five ways to identify intranet usability issues
- Card sorting: a definitive guide
- Information design using card sorting
- Card-based classification evaluation
- An introduction to personas and how to create them
Conducting an expert review
An “expert review” is a commonly-used technique to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the current site. This is often done at the outset of a redesign project, with the results used to target the usability work.
To support an expert review, the Intranet Review Toolkit provides a comprehensive set of heuristics (guidelines or criteria), allowing a detailed intranet review to be conducted that focuses on a wide range of functionality, design and strategy.
The Toolkit has been published under a Creative Commons license, allowing it to be freely downloaded and used (as long as certain conditions are met).
Read more:
- Intranet Review Toolkit (separate site)
Designing a usable intranet
Beyond general usability and information architecture principles, there are a number of issues that apply specifically to intranets, to ensure that they truly meet the needs of staff (and the business).
Read more:
- Design intranets all the way to the bottom
- Quantitatively test the effectiveness of your home page
- In-house recruitment of users for research
- Simplify the search user experience
- Accessibility tips for website construction
- Why are intranets structured like the organisational chart?
- Escaping the organisation chart on your intranet
In-house training
Step Two Designs has an extensive program of in-house training courses, designed to build internal skills and expertise. These are a quick and cost-effective way of growing team knowledge relating to usability and information architecture. Read more
