Intranet in a box

I was recently with an IBF client who was thinking about a new navigation design and information architecture for their intranet. "Can't we just adapt someone else's?" they asked. "How different can we be?".

This was a thought-provoking question. Certainly we see a great diversity of layouts and designs when we benchmark (you can see a galley of examples from the "My Beautiful Intranet" competition by signing up to Intranets Live). However, intranets fundamentally all do very similar things, so much of the diversity may well be more about history than necessity. Jakob Nielsen has also claimed that with the increasing adoption of portal software, many home pages are converging. he produced a composite image of The Canonical Intranet, which showed that at least the placement of menus and page apportioning was becoming more consistent.

Where intranets differ tends to center on:

• How it reflects the company structure. The degree to which the main intranet page is a common launching point for everyone or just the homepage for the head office says a lot about how centralized or federated a company is.
• How it reflects the company culture. A people-driven organisation will typically dedicate more space to news and even two-way communication such as discussion board topics. A more results-oriented organisation may focus more on a dashboard-like approach, giving an overview of performance status or workflow tasks.
• Employee's mental models of the company. If employees have a strong and consistent mental model of how the company is structured then being faithful to this in the intranet design will help them navigate (you can test this using card sorting). The downside is that it may be more confusing to new employees, and any departmental restructuring would require an intranet redesign too.

Where I would expect to see similarities are:

• Navigation elements that are in keeping with web conventions. Users grow to expect certain patterns such as branding in a banner at the top of the page and the main menu to be down the left side (or, increasingly, vertically under the banner). Conforming with these will reduce training and support costs.
• A task-driven approach to employee services. The designs that work best tend to be those that offer a menu of employee services grouped by theme rather than the department that provides the service.

Notably absent from the above list is the nature of the business. For example, there are three IBF members all in the same industry sector, but each with very different intranets due to their organisation and culture. So my conclusion with the client was that taking inspiration from other's intranets would give  a useful head start, but there had to be concious choices about ensuring it was a good fit to what makes an organisation unique.

Comments

[Chris McGrath]

You know what, that's one smart client you have there. Most proclaim how unique and different their situation is, when in fact many consultants will say they see virtually the same issues repeated in company after company.

It makes me wonder if we should start pre-populating our intranet-in-a-box software product (ThoughtFarmer) with a "canonical" intranet IA, as Nielsen puts it.

Something like this:
- Home
- About Us
- Employee Directory
- Departments
- Employee Resources
- Projects
- Tools & Links

It won't be as good as an IA designed by a professional, but it's a better start than nothing. Especially for clients that don't end up hiring a consultant.

[Rob Gray]

Interesting thoughts. I say yes - you can have an "Intranet in a box" that can also be personalised as you go along... if you speak to the average employee, ask them what they use their Intranet for and they say just one or two things... and reading the news stories written by an "offical" content author is never one of them.

The value of the Intranet of the Future lies not in content generated by the hands of pro content authors and also not in the hands of "just anyone", but rather everyone in the internal networks that are important to getting your job done: the value is in the connections, relationships and expertise within the organisation, not in a bunch of pretty content, links to web pages and documents.

I believe that the days of the traditional Intranet are over. Out of the box, it needs to be focus on ease of use, and be ready to go on day one, but still customisable in terms of branding, colours etc. which should not be more than a day's work.

With our Intranet - we have taken a bold move in that there are no "official" content authors... everything is a flow of information from our internal people networks. It has a pre-defined structure but each person can customise their views in order to tweak the way in which they receive their information flow. We also include customers and partners in our Intranet, so it has evolved into an extranet of sorts.

It's very people-oriented and the pre-defined structure consists of:

home page (feeds of everything going on in all your groups across the whole business, and summary information of the top 10 noisiest activities, updates of people activity and what they are doing)

groups (communities, departments, virtual teams, project teams etc. - anything that is a network of people)

people directory, containing people information as well as a dynamic view of their expertise (based on what they read and write)

Dashboards showing activity and employee engagement - helps to measure success

The base IA doesn't need to change often, but we've added personalised tabs so that everyone can structure their view of the Intranet in the way that makes sense for them. This way it's ready to go "out of the box" but it can also be customised when required, but it doesn't need to be customised before people start using it. We found that the benefit of doing it this way is that you can adjust it to how people actually use it, and not force them down the path we first imagined.

If anyone is interested in seeing it, let me know and I will write a blog post at http://robgray.org with some screenshots.