Launching an Intranet: The Crucial Step You Cannot Skip

An organization came to me recently seeking help with their failed intranet. They want to revitalize it and make it a great business tool.

I suggested they start with user research; they replied that they’d like to “get straight to design.” They meant color, fonts, images, branding.

Poorly implemented design elements such as color and font can break usability. But they aren’t the most important parts of the user experience.

Structure, location and labeling have more impact on success than the elements that make an intranet “pretty.” For example, look at the winner of DWG’s 2013 My Beautiful Intranet competition, Singapore International Enterprise. The article even notes that “beauty” can be defined in different ways--in this case, it was about how the site delivers what users need to be truly engaged.

Figure 1 shows the ideal process for creating an intranet. Bend the graphic into a circle and you get the ideal ongoing evolution of your intranet.

Figure 1

Research/test, wireframe, test, design. Do it again and again. Don’t stop doing it. Moreover, choose to ignore the user voice – the research and testing at the front end – at your own peril.

How to Listen to Users

Listening is much harder than talking. This is why most companies are bad at it. When we listen to users, we often do these things:

Interviews and Roundtables

We don’t go into an assignment to find the user voice by asking what they want. People cannot say what they want on the intranet because they cannot conceive what is possible.

Instead, we discover how they do their work, how they interact with the intranet, and how we can better leverage the technology to help them solve business problems.

Interviews and roundtables look at the following:

Interviews are typically done with those who are tougher to schedule (e.g., executives) or those who have specialized needs or roles (e.g., site managers). Roundtables are done with groups who work in the same function (e.g., operations, research, finance, human resources, etc.).

Usability Testing

Usability testing typically starts with what’s called card sorting. For those unfamiliar with it, here is how it works:

The results of card sorting help us understand how to structure the experience and how to label navigational elements. There are several online tools for card sorting that make it easy to include users from around the globe. Optimal Workshop, Userzoom, ConceptCodify, SimpleCardSort, UsabilityTools and Usabilitest are just some examples.  

After you begin wireframing the intranet – wireframes are simple line drawings that represent what goes where and how items are labeled – you can also do testing of the wireframes or testing of the information architecture. These are useful in confirming assumptions and validating your approach.

Site Review

The last item we include in a user voice research effort is site review. In site reviews, we look at an existing site for several important considerations:

We often follow up with site owners to learn more about their strategies, decisions and governance approaches.

More Thoughts About User Needs Research

Here are several other tips to consider when planning your user voice research:

Important Questions User Research Can Answer

Taken as a big picture, user voice research results can help you answer several important questions:

While it seems like a lot of up-front time, the more you invest in this stage, the better your chances of hitting a home run when you launch.