It's a question we don't ask ourselves often enough. What makes someone fire up that browser and look at the intranet? I have been in a lot of meetings where people think of the mythical user appearing, as if by magic, gazing at their page. I suspect that this never happens in the real world.
They came from
a search result
a link referring them there
a returning user based on a previous good experience
I don't want to be pessimistic, but I would propose that real people only use the intranet when they have to. You know the situation, you turn to your colleague and say "Do you remember how often we are supposed to submit those performance reports to finance?" and they answer "No idea, have you tried calling John in the accounts team?". Having tried to call him and failed you reluctantly go to the homepage of your intranet. You type 'performance reports" into the search box...hmmm loads of answers...try "finance performance reports"...you call out to your colleague "do you know where on the intranet...?". Need I go on?
I would propose to you that hardly anyone is on your intranet 'browsing' - they are way too busy - and nobody ever read the HR policy on maternity leave for fun. The reason they are on your intranet is to find something out to help them do something.
I recommend asking yourself 'why would they use this?' every single time you put a page together.
Comment below if you agree - and if you disagree!
Posts
I'm trying to instil the idea of task-based planning for intranet content.
ReplyDeleteToo often content is justification-based (we do this, this is our strategy, we are organised like this etc.), rather than based on what user task or activity their team can provide support to.
Chris,
ReplyDeletethanks for the comments. You make a very insightful summary of exactly the situation. I might think about blogging some ways around it. Any suggestions?
Allen
ReplyDeleteGreat to see a blog from a real intranet manager rather than a consultant.
I am now strongly pushing intranets as decision support tools, which is very much in line with other comments.
With this in mind I've developed White's Intranet Content Test. It is very simple. For every piece (or at least category) of content you need to be able to tell me who would use it, for what decision they would use it and how they would know they could trust the content to be good enough to make the right decision.
Martin White
Martin,
ReplyDeletethanks for the comments. Your questions are spot on. The subsequent challenge from most people is 'If the bbc news website is so good (and I use it every day) how come I don't make any decisions based on the information?'
Allen
ReplyDeleteI run a workshop where I collate the top 250 keywords / keyphrases from the intranet search engine for the past year.
I then put them into groups and get them to identify words that relate to the jobs they do and put them on a post-it.
Then we get the post-its and try and create a IA.
Benefits: they see what info people want and also the terms people would expect to be used in their areas.
Thanks for good reading. It's really nice to get a blog from an Intranetter.
ReplyDeleteI find that people use our templates and services and also read the news. A good guess is that 70 % of them use it on a daily basis. Of course they only use it if they can benefit from it.
Thanks for the comments - much appreciated.
ReplyDeleteI'm finding there is a mix of people who come for news (office based)and those who want to 'do things' (task based content for operational staff). If you are following a tried-and-tested task link you may well be blind to the news. There's a theory that there's a halo effect of good task based items drawing people into other content but I'm not seeing that bourne out for operational staff.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, in my office-based team I hardly ever send emails about business news anymore as the team always tell me they've already read it on the intranet, and often the content is identical
Thanks for the comments Linda. Totally agree about people being blind to the things they weren't looking for. Perhaps the subject of a future blog post?
ReplyDelete