Technical Writer

Our company intranet is a SharePoint site. I am the SharePoint administrator at my workplace, which effectively makes me the intranet administrator as well. Thus I was interested to see Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Best Intranets for 2008, and some of the comments he made about intranet design.

Neilsen says that in general intranet sites are better and more consistently designed. Single sign-on is important. (I absolutely agree with this one. If we hadn’t tied SharePoint to our Active Directory I am sure usage would drop by easily 50%.)

There was a focus on productivity. i.e. On making it easier for the user to do things.

Most of the intranet sites are content managment systems. They used a diverse range of platforms. The ten winners used 41 different products between them. The most used products were SharePoint and the Google Search Appliance, with Red Hat Linux, Lotus Notes and Domino, and Oracle databases also used a lot.

Trends Nielsen noted were:

• Increased personalisation
• Integration of information sources, often resulting in a single “one-stop shopping” page
• Emphasis on mission-critical applications and information (such as sales targets)
• Improved event and project calendars
• Special sections to help orient new employees
• Prominent display of stock quotes and other financial information
• Integration of external and company news, often in the form of customizable feeds
• Integration of alerts with the main intranet to inform users of important messages
• Redesigned and improved search features, which often went from horrible to good and generated ecstatic user feedback10 Best Intranets of 2008, Jakob Nielsen.

This is the second report on intranet’s that Nielsen’s group has produced in three months. In the first report, Intranet Information Architecture, he says that to provide a consistent user experience, when designing the intranet you should:

• Decide to proactively design the IA instead of letting it evolve
• Ensure that management supports the central Information Architect designer’s authority to provide guidance and structure to other departments’ intranet work
• Ensure that management won’t second-guess the design team and impose the awkward structures or navigational terms that individual executives happen to like.Intranet Information Architecture, Jakob Nielsen

If creating the intranet is outsourced, then the three points above happen automatically. It seems that when the job is done in-house, however, they do not. These are basic common-sense design issues that we all know, and often, the very same people who would ensure that the above three things happened on a project they were running for, say, software that was going to a customer, totally lose it when it’s the intranet, rather than an external product.

When we set up the original design for the SharePoint intranet at our work the Managers insisted on team-based areas, even though we tried to talk them into task-based. Some of it was politics. I don’t think any business unit likes to think they take a lesser position in the company than any other business unit, and often organising by tasks means that one or two groups take up more intranet real-estate than others. We have gone through multiple restructures since, and then we have to rearrange sub-areas on the site to suit the new organisation. Thank goodness it’s SharePoint, where the URLs don’t change when we move them. The managers also insisted on some weird security settings for the various team sites, the legacy of which we are still dealing with today. To be fair, at the time SharePoint was new, we weren’t aware of how it worked, and many people were worried that so-called ’secure’ data could now be changed by anyone in the system.

Intranet design has always been the poor relative to web design. It’s good to see people taking it seriously.

Last Modified : January 24th, 2008
Filed under : Tech Writer, SharePoint
Navigate : Previous post / Next post