Intranet Usability

Intranets could hardly be described as the sexy end of web development, but many companies around the world are experiencing real value from improved efficiency in terms of internal communications. Intranets can be big business.

The Internet hype may be dying down, but one area in which productivity gains can still be a reality is intranet development. Intranets could hardly be described as the sexy end of web development, but many companies around the world are experiencing real value from improved efficiency in terms of internal communications. Intranets can be big business.

But unfortunately, Intranets often illustrate everything that is worst in web design. I imagine most readers of this article will be familiar with those corporate Intranets that become little more than a collection of department websites, each with its own navigational structure, look and feel, and content. Some organisations even pride themselves on this laissez faire approach to Intranet development, seeing the intranet as an opportunity for departments to express themselves online.

Usability

The reality is that ease-of-use should be the central criterion by which all intranets are judged. For two key reasons usability is even more important in internal development than it is for external sites:

• Brand is unimportant. External site designers might have a case for including extensive graphical content, animations or Flash movies if the brand demanded that type of user experience. But when the audience is internal, this should be unimportant (if it isn't, that's the HR department's problem). By all means convey corporate culture, but remember that task completion and information retrieval should be all that matters.
• Alternatives are available. If an intranet isn't meeting the needs of users, they know exactly what to do. They will revert to the work patterns of six months ago. Any sense that an intranet is inefficient will mean users picking up the phone or using the applications they are supposed to leave behind. The result is a white elephant.

Intranet Advice

Obviously intranet development should incorporate all the standard usability engineering techniques - user requirement gathering, iterative development, user testing and so on. But there are certain specific guidelines that should be heeded unless there is a good reason to ignore them.

These include:

• Enforce standards and consistency. No matter how difficult the political landscape, allowing each department to design their section of an intranet is a recipe for disaster. Users require consistency - it helps them learn how the system works and avoids the need to adapt to new working methods each time they use a new area of the intranet. The cost of departmental vanity is inefficiency.
• Judge systems based on benefit to the whole organisation. Intranet features and functionality should not be included solely for the benefit of the department that implements them. A new online expense-reporting system, for example, may simply transfer workload from the accounting department to employees. Both this point and the last illustrate the need for strong central control of intranet developments.
• Focus on workflow. In some ways it may be counter-productive to reflect departmental organisation at all. Instead, think about the jobs and tasks people need to perform and build around them. This also applies to publishing models for the intranet itself. Define roles carefully in order to make sure that content does not descend into chaos.
• Keep it simple. In one sense intranets have a captive audience. There is no need to 'wow' anybody with impressive graphics, splash screens, or animations. If you need to use technology to move internal applications online, fine, but otherwise stick to the basics.
• Provide comprehensive coverage. Unlike an external website, you can assume that users of an intranet will have the opportunity to discover features and functionality over time. Internal training is even a possibility. That isn't to excuse bad interaction design, but to stress that stripping away features for the purposes of clarity is probably counter-productive in the long term.