Insights from Industry: Intranet Usability Best Practices

Holiday travel often affords students the opportunity to investigate Tech Comm happenings in their hometowns. Early this January, the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of SIGCHI (the ACM's Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group) hosted a presentation by Shane Ginsberg and Tommy Stinson from the design house Razorfish entitled "Best Practices for a Usable Intranet". A summary of the presentation's highlights follows.

Relate the Site to the Needs of the Business as well as the Employees

All too often, teams tasked with designing a new intranet steer development by attempting to address users' personal preferences rather than their business goals. Whether or not employees "like" their company's intranet is irrelevant if the site's features do not encourage increases in productivity and/or cost savings. There is of course a fine balance, however — these features will not be utilized if user preferences aren't considered during the requirements gathering phase.

To best identify audience needs, Ginsberg and Stinson suggest applying general user modeling techniques: break the overall employee population into smaller groups, identifying each group's unique needs and objectives. Then investigate the tasks that are employed by the groups to meet these objectives, while trying to identify specific tasks that might be good candidates for moving online by estimating time and cost savings. Once equipped with tangible figures, any feature trade-off decisions, not to mention presentations to the executive team, can be made from a more informed position.

Consider Level of Need in Addition to Ease of Implementation

It may be tempting to initially roll out the "quickie" features, such as an executive announcement tool, while finishing up development on larger, more complex applications. But realize that in so doing users may be driven away, disappointed in the lack of initial functionality and reluctant to take another look at the promise of new features later down the line. Consider a phased approach, where individual user segments aren't directly marketed to until a previously agreed-upon number of each segment's core needs have been successfully addressed. This process can also help determine which features to initially focus on — looking at a standard Return on Investment Trade-off Matrix (see Figure 1), those features that fall into Quadrant I would be good candidates for early development, while those in Quadrant IV may need to be reevaluated entirely.

Engage Your Users

Take advantage of the easy access to your users that intranet development affords — arrange to interact with employees from throughout the organization, using existing participatory design techniques such as interviews, focus groups and prototype evaluations. In large organizations spanning multiple geographies, consider leveraging other teams' relationships with groups that might otherwise be hard to access — work with the support staff to learn effective means of communicating with dispersed team members.

When working directly with your user base, there are a few potential problems to be aware of. First of all, respect the time they provide you with. They, like you, are very busy people and will not appreciate it if you come to meetings unprepared. Furthermore, don't waste their time gathering feedback on design decisions that will most likely not be changed. The second key issue to keep in mind when requesting user input is the need for clearly defined boundaries. Make it clear to your users what sort of information you are seeking, as well as how their feedback will be used. This will prevent problems later down the line if users feel their comments were not respected or integrated into the design. Clear boundaries can also sidestep issues arising from high-level stakeholders attempting to make design decisions not necessarily in the overall organization's best interests.

Develop Strong Cross-Disciplinary Relationships

The very nature of intranet design teams almost always requires people with very diverse backgrounds to successfully work together. To avoid conflicts throughout the design process, take the time early on to clearly define each team member's responsibilities. In addition, integrate a sort of "checks and balances" system throughout the process to make sure no single team member goes too far down any particular path without obtaining buy-in from his or her teammates. Consider creating a central project depository to allow each participant easy access to key documents.

For notes from this and other BayCHI events, please visit http://www.baychi.org/bof/web/