What is the intranet for? An easy question to ask, but surprisingly hard for many intranet teams to answer.

To be successful, intranets must have a clear definition of their purpose and character. This underpins decisions about future directions, as well as current priorities and activities.

Answering this question goes a long way to defining the intranet ‘brand’. More than just colours and logos, the brand captures and communicates the nature of the intranet.

This briefing will outline a simple technique to start the process of determining the intranet brand.

Product Reaction Cards

The user experience team at Microsoft have published a very interesting tool called the ‘Product Reaction Cards’, which can be freely downloaded from the team’s website:

www.microsoft.com/usability/UEPostings/ProductReactionCards.doc

This contains a wide range of words that can be used to describe almost any product, whether physical or electronic.

It includes words such as ‘innovative’, ‘engaging’, ‘collaborative’, ‘reliable’, ‘effective’ and ‘useful’.

These can be used to help define the future direction and role of the site, narrowing down the many possibilities to one clear direction.

The cards also contain a range of negative words, such as ‘dated’, ‘overwhelming’, ‘irrelevant’, ‘busy’, and ‘complex’.

These have obvious application to the current intranet in many organisations.

[CM Briefing 2008-08, read the full article]