Step Two Designs

How much of your intranet home is red (irrelevant) vs green (directly helpful for staff)?

Designing for mobility goes beyond just small screens and touch interactions, to encompass the user’s context and tasks.

This article outlines three tiers of activities that can make an intranet accessible for those with disabilities.

In this modern age, mobile devices should be supported when redesigning intranets.

Intranet redesigns involve a huge amount of work, so how do we make this the last big redesign that’s needed?

The digital workplace offers a compelling vision of the future, but the right foundations must be in place.

Tree testing provides a cheap and effective way of checking draft navigation before proceeding further into a redesign.

When should online card sorting be used, and how to make the most of it as a research technique?

Organisations with a strong public brand and reputation are under growing pressure to deliver an intranet to match.

Including a tickertape on the intranet homepage can be an effective way of communicating real-time updates.

Jargon can make it hard for even experienced intranet users to find what they need and to complete tasks.

Intranets filled with ‘blah blah’ landing pages can make it impossible for staff to find what they need.

There are many possible intranet policies that could be established regarding new windows and tabs.

Intranets can’t afford to be useful but ugly, and inspiration should be drawn from modern web design standards.

Understanding common and important staff tasks underpins every aspect of intranet design and management.

It is widely assumed that intranet homepages need to be squeezed into a single screenful, but can longer pages be made to work?

Intranet projects are challenging, and it’s easy for teams to fall into common traps that can undo the good work being done.

The ‘three clicks rule’ is perhaps the most widely known web design principle, but it’s a myth.

There are many different uses for the intranet homepage, and a balance must be gained to meet business and staff needs.

There are two types of CMS users: frequent ‘power’ users, and less-frequent ‘business’ users. The needs of both groups must be met.

Search doesn’t work out of the box, and up to 80% of the default functionality must be stripped out for general search users.

Over the years, we have published a vast amount of information on intranets. In this article, we attempt to wrap up all the activities that form part of an intranet design (or redesign) into one concise checklist.

We all know we should involve users when redesigning a website, but where do you start? Talking with staff in your own organisation allows you to leverage their vast body of knowledge on your website audience.

If a CMS is not usable then it will not be successfully used by authors, and this can be assessed during product selection.

Usability and information architecture (IA) are core areas of expertise for intranet teams, and all organisations should take steps to build this expertise internally.

It is not enough to focus an intranet redesign on just the home page, global navigation and page layout.

This article explains a quick and effective technique for assessing whether your home page is an effective gateway to site content.

This article outlines nine steps that can be taken by all intranet teams to improve the effectiveness of search, covering both design and under-the-hood changes.

We all know accessibility is important, but precisely how does one make a website or intranet more accessible? Often what is needed is a pragmatic view, based on real experience, to reveal what is really important and what should be tackled first.

When deploying a CMS across the whole organisation, the rule is: the more users, the simpler (and more usable) the system should be.

Creating strong information scents allows users to confidently find desired content on websites and intranets.

This article provides an overview of what usability is (and what it is not), as well as giving ideas on how to include more usability activities in projects.

Using a ‘strawman’ design in the early stages of a project can help to overcome many of the difficulties in the design process.

By improving the way the intranet supports key tasks, immediate business benefits can be delivered in a manageable and cost-effective manner.

FaCS applied user-centred techniques in the redevelopment of their large Government intranet, and it serves as a useful model for other organisations looking to tackle the same issues.

Creating personas is an effective way to understand the needs of your users, priortise features and functionality, and direct the design of your intranet or website.

This article provides five techniques to identify likely usability problems in your intranet. Some techniques provide indications about where the main problems lie, others provide concrete evidence.

A redesigned site can be easy and quick to use, and perfectly structured, and still be useless. For a site to be useful, it must meet user needs, and there are a range of techniques for identifying these.

The success of a CMS depends it being used, and whether authors create content. It these two challenges makes the usability of the CMS critically important.

KM has much to learn from usability, which can provide many useful starting points for structuring and managing KM projects.

A case study describing how to deliver a successful searching solution. Provides guidelines on user interface design, indexing configuration, search engine weightings and more.