Intranets: Design Isn’t Everything

So everyone’s been complaining about your intranet. It was good when it started but now it’s cluttered and no-one knows where anything is. The search function never finds what people want and they generally think it’s just boring.

You decide that a redesign is a good idea. You re-work the information architecture, rearrange the interfaces, place the Search function in the top right and the Home link in the top left. You clearly show the user’s current position in the navigation structure at all times.

It’s all good stuff. But when you’re finished, still no-one uses it. They say it looks nicer, but they still can’t find what they want.

What’s gone wrong? After all this time and effort why haven’t things improved?

Many intranets suffer from bad content management processes. Is yours? Here’s a list of symptoms:

* Most documents on the intranet are out-of-date.
* The search returns too much stuff, it takes forever to hunt through and find what you want.
* There are several versions of the same document available in different places and no-one is sure which one to use.
* Items returned by the search function are just irrelevant.
* The news section is cluttered and most of it is not new.
* The home page is so crammed with marketing information clamouring for your attention, that no-one ever sees it.
* There are about two documents under each of the main headings of the site, along with about 40,000 documents under “Other” and about 35,000 under “General”.

Sound familiar? Stephen Jay Gould, the evolution scientist, pointed out that good design won’t necessarily solve all your problems. As he put it: “You can be the sleekest, fastest, best-adapted, highest-predator fish in the water. But if your pond dries up, you’re dead.”

So too with intranets. You can have the most intuitive information architecture and the most straightforward interfaces in the world, but if your content management process is bad, many of the problems will remain.

Here are some points about content management processes that should be considered:

Make someone responsible. Every item on the intranet should belong to someone. Their name and job role should be attached in separate fields in the item’s metadata. For example, “Peter Peters” and “Retails Sales Manager”. Or “Anakin Skywalker” and “Assistant Sith Lord.” Including the job role is important because even if Anakin is killed in a light sabre duel or leaves to work in an icecream shop, you can still work out who the current Assistant Sith Lord is.

Include “Review Dates”: Each item on the intranet should have a review date. As the review date approaches, emails are sent to the Document Owner saying that the item will be removed automatically unless it is reviewed. Give them several weeks. I have seen several intranets that are over 5 years old, in which more than 70% of the content was out-of-date and useless. Can you imagine trying to find a particular document amongst that morass?

Make reminder email addresses generic: Reminder emails for reviewing items should be generic and job-role-based rather than personal. For instance: “marketingmanager@galacticempire.gov.uk” rather than “yoda@galacticempire.gov.uk”. The IT department can then direct the emails to the right person without having to change the metadata itself. So when Yoda leaves his job and is exiled to a planet made entirely of mud and snail crap, it isn’t hard to make sure the reminder emails go to his replacement.

Document owners are not document updaters: The person who adds the document to the intranet is not necessarily the Document Owner. A manager might be responsible for writing the “Performance Review Process” document, but they will then send it to their assistant to put it on the intranet. Or more often than not, they’ll give it to a temp who’s been hired to bring the intranet up to date. Which means that using the login of the document updater as a way of identifying the Document Owner is misleading. Let the user set the Document Owner manually, by choosing from a list.

Find the balance – Bottleneck vs. Open Slather: This is the hardest part of the whole content management process. If you let everyone put content onto the intranet, then you have a free, open, highly-communicative system which is populated largely with old rubbish that’s been put in the wrong place. If you let only some people put content up then get a quality-controlled, well-organised site that it takes 3 months to add urgent documents to, because the one departmental representative who has the right access is always too busy. There is no easy answer to this. You have to find the balance between quality-control and openness that fits your organisation best. But be aware – there is such a thing as too much quality control, and there is such a thing as too much openness.

Have a place for the “latest thing”: This is a matter of design, but it’s to do with designing for good content management rather than for good usability directly. There’s usually a set of people in any organisation who want their latest thing to be the most prominent thing on the intranet. They demand that it be added in an attention-grabbing but inappropriate place. Soon you’ve got a home page full of mad, flashing, inconsistent links that everyone finds a confusing eyesore. Don’t judge these people harshly. It’s not entirely their fault, they have their own pressures to perform what with Darth Vader demanding that their product range outsell everything else ever, on pain of being strangled. Make sure you have a prominent place on the intranet for a few of “the latest things” and make it clear that there can only be a limited number of them. (It will still be a battle, but at least you can show you’ve catered for their needs.)

Eliminate “Other”: If possible, avoid having a category called “Other” or “Miscellaneous”. It’s not easy, but definitely give it a go.

The intranet is not a substitute for communication: It’s sad but true. People do put things onto the intranet and then not tell anyone who needs to know.

Here’s how the script goes:

Attack Commander: When are you going to update the procedure document on maintaining the Giant Walking Laser Attack Machines?
Engineer: I did that 6 weeks ago.
Attack Commander: What? We’ve been using the old one! We can’t steer properly. Why didn’t you tell me?
Engineer: I put it on the intranet.
Attack Commander : Where?
Engineer: www dot intranet dot galactic empire dot gov dot uk slash procedures slash weapons slash newstuff slash machines beginning with ‘G’ slash oh five oh seven slash gwlam slash instructions.
Attack Commander: Why didn’t you tell anyone?
Engineer: It was on the intranet. You could’ve found it.
Attack Commander: I wish I could strangle you from a distance by holding up my thumb and forefinger like Darth Vader does.

This is often a matter of organisational culture and should be addressed in training. Even though you’ve added your document to the intranet and it’s therefore publicly available, it’s often a good idea to tell the one or two people who really need to know quickly that it’s been done. The intranet allows you to share documents easily, but it isn’t a complete replacement for one-to-one communication.

So, the moral of the story is this: if you’re receiving complaints about your intranet, consider the possibility that the content management processes are causing issues as well as the design. A usability audit should therefore include an examination of these processes, along with interfaces and information architecture.