Masterclass Part II: Exploring intranet usability and redesign

In the second of this series on intranet usability and redesign, Stephen Musselwhite details the options available to those looking to redesign their intranet, having completed usability testing.

In the last installment we established that any desire to redesign an intranet should stem from an assessment of its ability to achieve its stated aims, not just from observing a fad – on the internet, for example. There are also numerous reasons why usability testing will not always bring about the results expected.
Any redevelopment of the intranet should strive to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the end-to-end management of the intranet. This means ensuring revised approaches and processes are simple. Significant focus should be given to ensuring every step of the process is relevant, to simplifying every step of the process, and to ensuring a consistency of approach.
Figure 2 suggests an approach to managing the major steps in redesigning an intranet. The first step is to review the findings from the range of usability evaluations undertaken. Following on from the review of the findings, some prioritisation of issues will be required.

Prioritising usability redesign options
When applying fixes to usability issues identified during the usability-evaluation process, some prioritisation will be required. It is useful to assess the usability issues according to how great an impact their presence has, and the frequency with which they are likely to occur, in order to establish the priority in which they should be tackled.
Priority must be given to issues that frequently create a high level of impact. Examples of such issues will include fundamental usability issues with commonly used components of core applications, such as the contact directory. These are ‘must do’ usability issues that absolutely must be addressed as urgent priorities. Usability issues that have a low impact, but high frequency, will typically be highly-visible issues, which are very familiar to most users. These are the small issues that users may well have created workarounds to deal with, but would really appreciate having fixed. Addressing these issues will improve user sentiment towards the intranet, so are worth prioritising for that reason. Usability issues of a high impact but low frequency must be addressed as strategic issues. These will affect fewer users, but can be significant enough to prevent task completion, entirely forcing users to go elsewhere.
As already discussed, fixing usability issues frequently requires looking at the inputs into the intranet. This article examines the range of options for addressing an intranet redesign in detail.

The options for intranet redesign
Figure 4 illustrates the dimensions that should be covered by options for redevelopment, ranging from a complete redevelopment, to a partial refresh.
The options for redesigning an intranet are varied, but can be distilled into the following categories.

Complete redevelopment
When an intranet is fundamentally broken, it needs more than a ‘lick of paint’ to bring it to life. A complete overhaul of the strategy, governance structure, content-management process and technology is required.

Partial redevelopment
If a particular component of an intranet is deficient, such as the information architecture, a partial redevelopment may be required. This may or may not require the implementation of new technology, but will require some changes to the underlying information architecture or search, for example. The implementation of a new search engine will be a common, partial-redevelopment exercise.

Full refresh
An activity such as the rebranding of the intranet should be considered as a refresh. The underlying strategy, governance model and content-management process and technology shouldn’t require updating. The focus is purely on bringing the aesthetics of the intranet in line with a new brand, for example. A full refresh will require more change than a simple update of style-sheets and graphics, for example, but would not require a change to strategy. The implementation of a new visual identity across an organisation would require cosmetic changes to the intranet interface and design, and even the tone of the content. Changing the tone of the content would require the provision of training and support for content managers and authors.

Partial refresh
If only part of the intranet needs cosmetic attention, a partial refresh is required. A partial refresh should only require a change to cascading style-sheets, but will not require a change to strategy or governance. The dimensions that require consideration are as follows.

Strategy
Failure to clearly articulate an intranet strategy and to secure the support of senior management for that strategy will marginalise the importance of the intranet. If an intranet doesn’t have a strategy, it will quickly become obvious to users that it has no direction. The information architecture will be inefficient and the content poor. No strategy equals poor usability.

Governance structure
Intranet governance refers to the structure in place to ensure the strategy is pursued and realised. The main problem with the intranet-governance structure within many organisations is that there isn’t one, or it is severely lacking and tokenistic at best.
One of the fundamental issues affecting intranets is the concentration of decision making within one area of the organisation. The ownership of the intranet so often lies within the internal communication, information technology or human resources departments, and undue influence is often exerted by the owning department.
A governance structure that provides true representation from across the organisation, is required. The governance structure needs to be driven to deliver results and will usually consist of the following tiers.

Senior management sponsor
A single senior manager (preferably the most senior manager) should be the overall sponsor of the intranet. For him or her, sponsorship should mean not only providing financial resources and endorsing the direction recommended by the steering group, but also providing advocacy for the intranet within their peer group, and actively using it as a two-way communication channel with the organisation. Having the opportunity for dialogue with senior management is one of the most engaging communication approaches an organisation can take.

Steering group
A steering group’s role is to set the strategic direction for the intranet. The steering group will typically be the most senior of the business sponsors of intranet sites (and potential sponsors of intranet sites), and will rely upon the working group for the detailed recommendations for the strategy. Steering groups will meet less frequently than the working groups.

Working group
The working group provides input from the operational areas of the organisation, with representation typically from content managers and the central intranet team. The objective of the working group is to ensure the strategy is built around the operational needs of the organisation.

Content-management process
The process for managing intranet content must be subject to a similar degree of usability evaluation as the published content, because poor-quality process-inputs lead inevitably to poor-quality outputs.
Without a clear content-management process, even the best content-management technology will fail to provide a great intranet.

Content-management technology
Some technology platforms are inadequate because they simply fail to properly enable a content-management process. Some are inadequate because they fail to keep pace with the competition and will fail to enable the intranet to evolve in an efficient manner (for example, no provision of integrated Web 2.0 tools).

Information architecture
Intranets have a habit of growing rapidly. Whatever the size of the intranet, the structure will require periodic validation to ensure it meets the needs of users. Changes to the structure of the organisation or the nature of the work it undertakes will have an impact on the information architecture of the intranet. The introduction of Web 2.0 technologies provides new and more complex methods for structuring and navigating through content. Users are now in a position to engineer their own information architectures through shared bookmarking and tagging.

Search
Search is probably the most maligned component of intranet usability, and is often the focus of a partial redesign. Where the intranet has yet to become the single source of information, federated search is provided to help the intranet attain the role of portal into all sources of information.
Truly fixing search is rarely achieved by implementing a new search engine, and when that does work, it only improves search functionality. If intranet teams really want to improve search, they should focus on content. The benefits attained will be far greater.
Parametric or faceted search is an emerging technique, aided by the evolution of Web 2.0 technologies, which enables the combination of ‘search and browse’ to help users locate content. This approach to searching and navigation relies heavily upon the explicit and exposed categorisation of content. Historically, this has been driven by a formal classification, such as a taxonomy, but increasingly user-generated folksonomies are helping to define the categorisation of content. Taxonomies have historically offered little user value, because they have been hidden behind the scenes. Exposing classification terms and linking directly to search, for example, greatly increases the value of taxonomy-derived metadata.

Content
Intranet users will be deterred more by poor-quality content than by almost any other dimension of intranet usability. Good-quality content requires good-quality inputs to the content-management process. A substantial redevelopment of the intranet is required where the content-management process fails to provide valuable content. Comprehensive content-management training is required to ensure not only that content managers are well-versed in the mechanics of the operation of the content-management system and other tools, but also in the concepts required to ensure that the content is well written, structured, and presented to aid comprehension.

Applications
The applications available from the intranet are frequently the most-used components of an intranet, and the most valuable. Proving the return on investment provided by an intranet and any planned usability improvements to that intranet, will need to focus on the value provided by generic applications, such as the content directory, expertise locator, lexicon of terms (jargon-buster), and personal productivity applications, such as expense claim and room-booking tools.
By far, potentially the most valuable tool to be hosted on the intranet is the contact directory. For years, the contact directory has essentially been a telephone directory, and has been a largely under-utilised application. The arrival of Web 2.0 concepts and technologies has heralded a rapid acceleration in the rate of improvement to the humble telephone directory and contemporary contact directories have evolved into powerful tools to assist the organisation in achieving its objectives more efficiently. Contact directories essentially lubricate the social networks within the organisation, from discovery to delivery, far more quickly.

Why intranet usability isn’t instinctive
Creating a usable product sounds like the application of simple common sense, and in most cases it is, but the process of creating an intranet requires a multitude of complex inputs from a large number of disparate groups. Unfortunately, very often, the application of simple usability concepts falls through the gaps, leaving an ultimately compromised product.Training is a central issue here. Although usability should be regarded fundamentally as a philosophy, it is also a discipline requiring the application of specific skills – skills that very often need to be taught not only to web developers or designers, but to every group involved in the management of the intranet. Where usability training is conducted within organisations, it is often undertaken too narrowly to have the impact it should. Intranets designed and implemented by teams of highly-skilled designers and developers, can still fail in usability terms when content is contributed by content managers whose training has failed to cover the basics of intranet usability.
Where the governance structure surrounding the intranet is weak, or where roles and responsibilities are ill-defined, sponsors and content managers may have a disproportionate influence on the interface design of an intranet sub-site, usually at the expense of good usability. They dictate the design, thus compromising the value the designers are able to add to the process.
Developers often take a developer-centric view of intranet developments, because usability has yet to become central to their focus, particularly when under time pressure to deliver to deadlines. Developers tend not to empathise with the ultimate users of the intranet-templates they create, not because they are incapable of doing so, but usually because they have not considered the need to. They are in delivery mode, and as they are ultimately not the consumers of the product they are creating, they follow the path of least resistance. Consider, for example, a content-management system template that requires the user to scroll through numerous redundant fields before entering the content. Developers must be educated to aim for elegant simplicity in their outputs, to enable the next chain to be more productive and consistent.
In the next issue of the magazine, we will explore who takes responsibility for the each element of the redesign, and the various ways in which usability can be improved.

This article is an excerpt from Ark Group’s Intranet Usability and Redesign report, by Stephen Musselwhite. For more information contact Adam Scrimshire at ascrimshire@ark-group.com or +44 (0)20 8785 5914