The User is Always Right:A practical guide to creating and using personas for the webSteve Mulder and Ziv Yaar This is a book drawn from the experience of having created many personas for a wide range of different organisations. More than that, the authors have clearly been creating great personas that have had real impact on the websites they support. In a very practical way, the book works through all of the core aspects of personas. How they work, when to use them, the benefits of personas and what they look like in practice. This is all written in a

It would seem to be a statement of the obvious that organisations should do their planning before embarking on the implementation of their new content management system (CMS). Yet all too often this doesn't occur. Let's state this more strongly: the day after the contract is signed with the CMS vendor, the vendor will show up asking: so, what are we actually implementing? If there is not a clear and simple answer to this, the project will go poorly, and the vendor will be more than a little frustrated (which itself may have consequences). This briefing explores the specific details

It goes without saying that an intranet is only successful if staff can easily find the information they need, when they need it. Recognising this, the majority of intranet teams follow a 'user-centred methodology' when they redesign the intranet. This involves making use of core usability and information architecture (IA) techniques, such as card sorting and usability testing. In many cases, intranet teams bring in external consultants or contractors to assist with the redesign project, relying on these individuals to provide the necessary usability and IA skills. While there are many good reasons for doing this, what is often not

Organisations often make the selection of a CMS much harder than it needs to be. They do this by running into common pitfalls that impact not just on the selection process, but on the overall success of the CMS project. Over the past ten years, we have worked with many organisations on content management systems, and have seen a huge number of tenders released to the marketplace. Across these projects, the same issues are seen again and again. These most often relate to how the requirements are documented, or how the overall tender is structured. They may also arise from

Perhaps the single greatest pleasure of the work that we do is the opportunity to conduct "needs analysis" that involves getting out into the front-line environment of organisations. Following an "ethnographic" approach, we're able to spend time with the staff who do the actual work, building an understanding of their real needs and issues. While we use a range of techniques (such as one-on-one interviews, workplace observation, contextual inquiry), the basic approach is incredibly simple. At its heart, it just involves going out with eyes and ears open, asking naive questions, and getting amazing answers. Front-line environments are endlessly fascinating,

This keeps coming up: one of the benefits that is sold for portals is that users can "personalise" (or tailor) what content and functionality is displayed on their home page. The problem is that users don't personalise, despite the hopes (and optimism) of the IT team. Now, I "know" that the real-life statistic is that only 5-10% of users personalise. This means that 90-95% of staff will leave the portal as-is, leaving the portal owners with the same design, usability and IA challenges they had with the intranet. The problem is that I don't have an official source for this

Today I completed the draft of what will be our next report: the 6x2 methodology for intranet planning. This is something that I've hinted at for the last few months, but I can finally unveil what it actually consists of: Step 1: Give the intranet a version number Step 2: Scope the first six months Step 3: Determine a new version number Step 4: Review the in-scope list Step 5: Create a detailed project plan Step 6: Sketch out the following six months Step 7: Create an executive briefing Step 8: Create an 'intranet concept' Step 9: Implement the six

The design of intranets can be pretty standard, with many sites following the same basic layout. The diagram above shows a typical intranet page, consisting of the following elements: page header, containing global navigation left-hand navigation, containing local navigation body of the page page footer This is all pretty standard, nothing that anyone wouldn't immediate recognise. By default, new intranet designs tend to automatically follow this model. All that being said, I'm nonetheless starting to wonder: is left-hand navigation evil? The good Left-hand navigation is obviously not inherently evil. There is a clear need to help users to navigate their

There’s been a bit of discussion recently about the central role of the WYSIWYG editor in a CMS solution. Considering that the primary purpose of a web content management system …

It has to stop. The current metaphor of the intranet as an "internal website for staff" is crippling us. This metaphor is a direct cause of our unhealthy focus on just the usability, information architecture and content of the "site". We spend endless amount of time working on maintaining intranets, and yet intranets today are little different from the way they were ten years ago. Along the way, the road is littered with burnt out intranet teams, wearied by the struggle to get organisations to finally "recognise the value of the intranet". Instead of the "intranet as website" metaphor, we