Intranet Benchmarking Forum

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.

Are your users always right?

One of the things we ask in an IBF Benchmarking exercise is how well connected the intranet team is to its users. The best companies have feedback tools on the intranet, work closely with the IT helpdesk and with the publisher community to listen to what users want.

However, this doesn’t mean you always get good advice by listening to what users say. There are potential limitations such as:

• Users tend to ask just for incremental improvements to what they already know
• Comments may be from a vocal minority and not be representative of what most people need
• Often people can’t visualise the hypothetical scenarios accurately and have rose-tinted expectations (see, for example, the earlier post on this blog "Can't we have an intranet search engine like Google?")
• The request may be at odds with your organisation’s strategy

For example, a commonly heard message when talking to users about  information-seeking is that most people say they would prefer to ask a colleague than search a system such as an intranet. This has been shown  even as far back as Tom Allen's work in 1977 (pdf).

However, if you dig deeper, this doesn’t appear to be true of all situations. Older generations may have an ingrained expectation that databases rarely have the right answer because they used to require complex search syntax; teenagers seem to assume Google can answer everything (limitation 2). Some types of information are much more likely to be available from a system than a person. If you wanted to know film times at the local cinema, would you have more success asking a friend first or use the web? (limitation 3).

Finally (limitation 4), one reason why intranets are attractive is that they can reduce internal service costs. You may not want highly-paid staff answering the phone all day for routine queries, no matter how much the caller may prefer that mode. You want to keep them free for the high-value, non-routine work that really needs people to people interactions. Each query has a cost, but asking a colleague in an organisation doesn't usually expose the requester to that cost. If your staff were a premium-rate helpdesk, its unlikely they would be troubled so readily if the alternative was to get the answer on an intranet for free.

Easy wins for intranet usability: link lists, applied consistently

All too often a user who visits an intranet page in search of particular information will abandon that page when it does actually contain a link that will help them on their way. They miss the link.

It happens all the time. Users take the path of least resistance. At the intranet face, they will try tho or three strategies before giving up and asking the people sitting in their immediate area (whose own work will be disturbed), or picking up the phone to IT or HR. 

The problem of missed links is often more serious on intranets than on public websites. Enterprise content search has traditionally performed poorly compared to search on the internet - though this is changing - and users may have little luck with content search as a method of last resort. Employees are highly reliant on what is often a very vertically focused site, with little cross-linking. A missed link on a single page may mean that they can’t find the information on the intranet at all.

We can help users to spot links by doing some very simple things. The first and most important is always to include links in link lists. Even where they are highlighted elsewhere on the page. 

This may seem an obvious practice, but it is rarely consistently adhered to. Often a specific and important area of content on an intranet is highlighted in some way, for example by placing it in what the designer regards as a prominent position on the page. Perhaps off on the right with a tab of its own, or in a special box by itself on the left. It may even be accompanied by a jazzy graphic. 

Unfortunately, that means a large number of people looking for that link will give up or hit the Back button before they spot it. And while users are trying to find that link – the one that the designer believes is ‘staring them in the face’ – they experience considerable frustration. 

Let’s look at some different treatments on the web.

On the City of Edinburgh Council home page, the link to the list of council services is on its own, at the top of the right column. To make matters worse, the orange graphic requires a double take – I only managed to figure out the letters ‘A-Z’ once I had clicked on the link and seen a page title including ‘A-Z’. (Nor is it not clear without mousing over whether any of the text or graphic are clickable, and the text is indented, out of line with the items below it.) Thankfully there’s also a clear A-Z link included in the group of links at the top left of the page, above the tabs. 

And another. The British Heart Foundation site has a direct link to their press office information from the home page, but it may be the last thing you take in on the page: the link is isolated and also has a different visual appearance to many of the surrounding links – it looks like it might be just a graphic. Of course once you have spotted the link and realised its meaning, it becomes perfectly obvious. And in the case of the BHF, visitors can also fairly easy find the press office through the left menu options.

Finally, let's look at the Liberty website. Here there's a clickable graphic encouraging visitors to 'join now', in the top right of the page. It's big and loud and clear, and you may well spot it straight away. But notice there's also a Join option within the tabs, leading to the same page. The organisation is not relying on users seeing the Join Now link.

So belt and braces: avoid isolated links if you can, but if you have to have them, include them also in the regular navigation structure such as link lists and menus. 

Improving Intranet Search

Following on from our look at intranet search this week, IBF have recently released some new research into Improving Intranet Search, the IBF web site contains a summary of this report.

The report, authored by Elizabeth Marsh, looks at the challenges facing intranet managers around intranet search:

"Search is one of the most common causes of dissatisfaction for intranet users. Among IBF members, scores for search are some of the lowest in the Design and Usability quadrant of the IBF benchmarking model: members achieve an average for people search of 57 per cent, and an average for content search of 66 per cent.

At the same time, search tends to be a focal point for users’ frustration when they don’t find the information they need – irrespective of whether the search tool is the problem. So the pressure is on intranet managers to provide effective search."

After extensive research Elizabeth comes up with some lessons for intranet managers:

Lessons for intranet managers

To overcome these barriers and provide effective search, we make six key
recommendations:

• Develop strategy and define scope – be clear on how search should be
  developed to support the overall intranet strategy
• Understand users’ needs – there is a wide range of search functionality
  available and no single route to providing effective search. It is therefore
  essential to understand the needs of users to select the best options
• Invest in continuous improvement – achieving effective search is an
  ongoing process of adjustment based on user feedback and search
  reports
• Get usability right – follow best practice for usability and focus primarily
  on providing a search that works for the majority of users
• Don’t view search in isolation – search is part of a bigger picture, and you
  need to understand and address the other factors that affect search
  performance
• Build user trust – user trust must be built gradually and carefully.

Successful intranet search at BT

You might not think the tips from the last post are rocket science, that’s because they are not, but many organisations do not spend enough time understanding how their users use search and how it could be improved.  Improving search does take time and dedication.  At BT the intranet team have worked hard in this area resulting in an award winning search capability.

Mark Morrell, Intranet Manager at BT described what went into search at BT, and why they are such worthy award winners:

• The intranet team took time to research and understand the search engine they had, both the limitations it might have and also how to get the most out the functionality it offered
• Both basic and advanced search is available from every intranet page
• But before people even get to search there are several alternatives to aide the user in finding the content they need
  Popular sites and links
  Popular searches
  And A-Z listing of content
  Other places to look which may be useful
• Once the user chooses to search, they can opt to search one of the following
  The intranet
  The internet
  Internal news groups
• On the search results page there are
  Recommended links (developed through analysis of successful search results)
  Good details around the results, to give a clearer idea if this is the content the user is looking for
  The ability to refine the search without too much reworking

So, as you can see, BT’s intranet search already has many of the features looked for in the IBF search benchmark, however Mark describes how BT are always looking to improve the search further and not sitting still on this. “Our next plans are to review the search engine we use and to extend the search capability beyond the content held within our content management systems, further out into our document management systems and other databases”

They might be good already, but there can always be improvement… how does your intranet search fair?

Award winning intranet search

A further two IBF Best Intranet Awards were presented this week to:

• BT for Intranet Search
• HSBC for Usability

So what makes up a good search on an intranet?

IBF evaluates people and content search based on the steps users must perform to find results:

• Specify the search text
• Assess the search results
• Access the search results ...and as most people start searching without really knowing what they are looking for…
• Refine or revise and search again

So looking in a little more detail at these steps, look at your own intranet search and ask the following questions...

The search box – making it easy for the searcher

• Is a people search available from every page?
• Is content search available on every page?
• Does people and content search each have its own search box?
• Is it in the same place on every page?
• Is the search field on results page ready for the next search?

The ease of assessing and accessing the search results

• Does the results page provide feedback and advice, especially if there are no results?
• How detailed are the search results?  Just page titles, or people’s names are often not enough
• Does the information on the results page allow the searcher to make an informed choice about which are worth investigating further?
• Are the results laid out clearly on the page?
• How many are clearly displayed on the first pages (users still hate scrolling!)Does the results page indicate how many items were found?How good are the results shown?  If the first few are poor, trust in the search engine rapidly reduces
• Is there a clue about what has been found?  A web page, a document, a PowerPoint presentation?

Supporting the need to tweak the search text and search again.

As mentioned above many searches start by not really knowing what they are looking for.  The first search is often used to help them refine the search to then try again to find what they really want.

• Does the results page include search feedback and advice?
• Are there suggestions for other spellings or close spellings?
• If there are no results, do your results just say ‘no results found’, or does it try to help the user?
• Is the original search text there on the same page, so it can be easily adjusted?

Next we’ll be looking in more detail at what BT have been doing recently around Intranet search and why they won the IBF award.

IBF's Best Intranet Awards announced

The winners of IBF Intranet Awards for 2007 were announced this week at the quarterly IBF 100 meeting held at The British Library:

• Alliance & Leicester for Content
• Transport for London for Visual Design
• GlaxoSmithKline for Engagement
• AXA for Accessibility
• BDO Stoy Hayward and HSBC joint winners for Usability
• BT for Search
• Legal & General for Readability

The awards recognise achievement among IBF members and help to promote intranet best practice.

Judges are looking for members whose intranets have performed consistently well across the board in their IBF benchmarking review, and exceptionally well in their category. They use their knowledge of the organisation, its industry and its challenges to select a winner and runner-up in each category

In 2008 IBF are introducing new categories to cover the newer areas of benchmarking it's members:

• strategy and governance
• business value
• communication and culture

Over the next couple of weeeks I hope to catch up with a few of the winners and share a little more about their successes.

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Improving Intranet Search

IBF have just released a new research report on improving intranet search  by Elizabeth Marsh. Search is one of those aspects of intranets that users consistently seem dissatisfied with. In my experience they have high expectations of success from their experiences with internet search and usually expect intranet search to be easier to get right. In fact I think successful intranet search is a whole lot harder.

Despite usability being a relatively-well documented area, intranet search engines still don't follow good practice. For example:

• Default search has too many options
• Search results are poorly presented, often with lots of headers and whitespace at the top
• Results pages show thousands of hits (a common hazard when searching for a term that's central to your business)
• Results pages make metadata like date and title hard to scan
• When there are no hits due to misspellings, the system fails to give constructive feedback

There's really no reason why vendors shouldn't be getting this right by now, except that search is often just part of a bundle and sometimes not given as much priority as it should be in purchasing decisions. IBF found similar concerns with other out-of-the box interfaces for employee self-service applications (see Usability of Third Party Applications )

The report also highlights organisational issues around search. Website owners pay close attention to search engine optimisation, but few intranet content owners put as much effort into getting their pages high up the intranet rankings.

Aside from getting usability right, the report recommends that organisations should invest in continuous improvement of the user's search experience using features such as best-bets. It also advises that search should not be regarded in isolation, but as part of an overall approach to supporting what users are trying to do.  Make sure that the right content exists, that it is not fragmented across other systems, and that an appropriate taxonomy exists to help get the metadata right.

IBF members can download the full report from the IBF Extranet (pdf 2MB)

 

A-Z Indexes on Intranets

In an age of rapidly growing intranets, locating a piece of information on an intranet can be akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Primary navigation invariably still relies to a greater or lesser degree  on knowledge of the organisation and how it is structured, despite the onward march of task-based navigation. And content search, which can perform well for the average user on the Web, tends to perform less well on intranets, though search tools are improving. So it is always a breath of fresh air to find a well-designed A-Z or keyword index on an intranet.

While some people regard the A-Z as a quaint relic of a bygone age - perhaps those same people who predicted the death of the book in an online world - I have taken a lifelong interest in the back-of-book index and its transformation into an online tool. (Indeed I was for some years a member of the Society of Indexers.)

Indexes can deal with synonyms, with graphics, and with inferences, they can distinguish between homographs, and between the trivial and the significant. They have long been recognised as an excellent tool enabling users to find information quickly and easily. And while entire countries have managed to get by without widespread use of indexes - indexes tend to be a bit of an Anglo-American thing - we are now seeing the indexing profession spreading to developing economies such as China.

A-Z indexes are popular with the majority of intranet users, but they are particularly helpful for newer members of staff - who lack background knowledge of organisation hierarchies - and infrequent users.

At last week's IBF member event, where we held a session that included some coverage of A-Z indexes, there was considerable debate about the pros and cons of indexes and around how to make them more usable, far more than can be summarised here. So I'll focus on just a few points:

• An index has human intelligence behind it, while a concordance created automatically is merely a list of words with few of the benefits of a true index. Check out the American Society of Indexers own website A-Z index for an example of a true index done well.
• Make your index easy to use. For example, there's no excuse for providing tiny letters to click on, with insufficient space between them.
• Once you've got a good index, support your investment, don't hide it away. Give it a prominent position along with other important finding tools, such as Search. On the BBC website, you'll find the link to the A-Z right next to the Search text box, as part of the pervasive navigation.
• Indexes can be educational, leading users to explore and discover new material of interest without the risk of 'getting lost'.

Back in 1859, the then British Lord Chancellor pronounced,

So essential do I consider an Index to be to every book, that I proposed to bring a Bill into Parliament to deprive an author who publishes a book without an Index of the privilege of copyright; and, moreover, to subject him, for his offence, to a pecuniary penalty.

And William Casey, former Director of the CIA, was of the opinion that,

If there is no index, the book is probably not worth reading.

But A-Z indexes are not the answer for every intranet. They are not particularly good at dealing with fast-changing content, for example, and they do require regular maintenance (and therefore resources) if they are to continue to be useful and used.