HOW TO PROVIDE USEFUL INFORMATION IN A USER-CENTERED INTRANET SITE
- 1. MARCH, 2015 BY HSIUTAN HSIAO You may have come across this situation before: One day, you ran into a friend from high school. You two are not close to each other and haven’t met in years. He suddenly asked you to go to a literature conference which you were not interested in. However, you didn’t want to say no to his enthusiastic invitation. Therefore, you went to that conference unwillingly but a few days later you still couldn’t remember what the topic was about. The story shows you that the conference was not right for you. That’s why you couldn’t digest the content. This is the struggle that most intranet users encounter on a daily basis. An intranet is seen mainly as a corporate productivity tool helping employees connect to a company’s portal. However, engaging with your employees through an intranet does not just mean is not dumping the content there, but offering a user-centered site and supporting your employees with what they really need. Three Elements of Content Adhesiveness In order to make the user feel like they received a full journey of getting their information, the design process must start with understanding the users’ real needs. To design around these needs, the users have to go through the following key elements – the content has to be Usable, Relevant, and Desirable from the end to end experience around the users. If the content of the literature was usable, relevant, and desirable to you, you would better remember all of the information that you consumed.
- 2. “Good Content is User-Centered – Adopt the cognitive frameworks of your users” - Erin Kissane, THE ELEMENTS OF CONTENT STRATEGY Help: The Trigger for the Intranet Experience From the beginning, an intranet’s purpose is to help the users who utilize it. HELP How does the idea of “help” fit into an organization’s intranet? I have participated in many projects with different clients. Normally, the first sentence say to the stakeholder in the workshops is, “Hi, I am here to help make your job easier.” Help is the trigger for the intranet experience. Help is where the true need of the intranet users lies, and it’s where the intranet is born. It is not just a noun, but the verb that triggers the user to start to explore the intranet. FUNCTIONALITY Functionality can help position the intranet to help the user with their various tasks and responsibilities. We can see this with one of my previous clients, a national oil company located in the US. In this company, one of the daily tasks for most employees is to read business data from Spotfire, a third party tool, perform analysis, and track the numbers. As part of their regular workflow, they have to open two
- 3. applications, one for Spotfire data reports and one for their project site. Therefore, our solution was to design a dashboard integrating the Spotfire analytics report into the intranet project site to simplify the employee’s workflow. Features such as online administration groups, knowledge sharing, corporate activity, and HR portal can make the site more functional and thoughtful. You have to do user research before you put content on the site so that you will know what functionalities users require. Starting with user research early can help you save on the build budget, and create an opportunity to gain buy in from the early adopters, which will aid in winning the stakeholders’ trust. CONTENT In order to have a functional intranet site, content that is valuable for users needs to be available and accessible in the intranet. Sometimes, we forget to keep an eyes on our content until migration at the last minute. To prevent this, content strategy has to be in the plate at the very beginning when the project start running. We have to understand is what kind of content we can provide in the intranet and what types of content we have, for example, a document type like .DOC, .PDF or .XLS. Content types can help us when we do the taxonomy and also help the user find the right content on the search. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE The most common complaint I see for the intranets is that users cannot find information when they need it. One of my clients asked us to build a public government website for them. Our team helped this client to re-design their content-heavy, public CMS website. We came across with many challenges, one of which was how to re-design the navigation so users could more easily find the information they needed. We played card sorting activities with our stakeholders, allowing them to debate among themselves about the organization of their navigation. We took items from the existing content and sorted them into different groups. Due to the limited space for the navigation, we asked our stakeholders to organize the items from each category into two groups: “must-have” and “nice to have”. This resulted in a new site navigation that was more useful for users and allowed for better findability of content, and our client was happy with this newfound accessibility for their site and their content. Without the proper information taxonomy, the users will not reach what they want. This can be the case not only during the first time a user tries to find information on their intranet, but also the second time, third time, and so on. In this situation, the end users may lose trust in the intranet and in those who manage it. COLLABORATION Human behavior always plays an important role in the interaction between technology and the user. Therefore, without the human factor from collaborative interaction, there is no updated valuable content. In order to have productive collaboration, we need to have the user input from the human interaction. One of the pain points from a financial client was that they could not comment on a document and they could not tag his coworker to it, meaning he would not be able to easily give feedback on the document. Our team suggested that our client use Yammer, an enterprise social network. This helped our client’s
- 4. users to get connect with others in their company, and to share information to their team, the entire organization, or for specific projects. USER INPUT Turn human interaction input into results. Collaborative interaction helps to generate user input which helps the site be more relevant and efficient with up-to-date, valid content. Balancing user input with valuable up-to-date content will lead to continuous building of the site and grow into a supply and demand environment with gradual positive growth. One of our clients had a hard time to engage with their employees and was trying to make the intranet as a one-stop shop. Our team suggested the “My Apps” and “My Links” features, giving the power to the employee and turn their input in the intranet, which allowed people to customize the tools and links they used regularly to appear on their intranet homepage and additionally, be accessible on any page within the Intranet. This personalization and user input was hugely successful - in the first 48 hours after the site launched over 850 unique links created by staff, and over 160,000 page views were recorded. This marked an important staff transition from passive users to effectively engaged users, as they began putting the input into new Intranet and work immediately. RESPONSIVE According to IDC, the smartphone market will grow up to 71.1% in worldwide smart connected device market share. We all know the adaptive view on variable devices is the trend of the web design for the present and the feature. Responsive Web Design (RWD) came from the article in A List Apart in May 2010 by Ethan Marcotte which uses fluid grid, flexible images and media queries to create a website in different screen sizes. Back to the intranet, how we can integrate RWD into our site? We can work in a mobile adaptive way and start to think Mobile First but not Mobile Only. This way we will not lose the users from other devices. We have to prioritize the tasks in different devices for different users. The hottest topic between the client and us is how the user can open the intranet site settings and how they manage the files on the tiny screen phone. We need to understand the user’s flows on any device. Therefore, we always did user research first to learn user scenarios and then provide the necessary functions to the mobile users. Source: International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Smart Connected Device Tracker, September 11, 2013. USABILITY When we give clients our surveys at the start of our projects, there are few questions can be our best example like, “What is your comfort level using the current intranet with Sharepoint?”. We often hear, “I don’t use the intranet at all or I seldom use it” because it’s “hard to use” or they “could not find the information.” Or the survey question like “How often do you recommend the intranet to colleagues?” Over 53% employee chose the answers in the survey as occasionally, never, and often. Over 24% employee chose sometimes. Which shows a low usability rate for the intranet. If you want to have a great site, you need real users to test the site before it goes to the public. No matter how many QAs or UAT you have, you still need the real users to test it. Users have their own way
- 5. of approaching problems. In usability testing, you need the target audience to test the site, one user at one time. Observe users when they are testing the site and make notes of the questions you do not understand during the users’ workflow. Interview the users after the testing and make them explain to you what they are thinking, when they are trying to react, how they are doing it, and where they are clicking. These questions will help us understand the users’ actions. By focusing on a What/When/How/Where matrix during the interview, we can understand the users’ actions. TRUST Trust drives the users to go through the whole journey. As a UX researcher, designer, developer, and QA, I have learned from interaction design and previous projects. I noticed that people were most engaged when they utilized the five senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Therefore, when people are interacting with the technology, we need to bring up something that most closely emulates human interactions. For example, we could be more focused around the user’s User-Centered Design, be more focused around human’s Emotion Design, or put more of our focus on the usefulness to the user’s Usability. Building a relationship between the user and the site through design is what leads users to trust the site. The biggest frustration we heard the most from the intranet employees is they do not trust the site because there was no people search, data dashboard, employee and group collaboration, corporate news, rank content, HR portal or social in the intranet. The intranet did not make their life easier and instead they had to go to many place to find content. Without a proper functional up-to-dated content, employee will not trust the intranet. IN CONCLUSION Remember our story about being invited to the literature conference? Next time, you can see whether the content there will be Relevant, Usable, and Desirable to you. Similarly, an intranet user will be looking for the elements of Help, Functionality, Content, Information Architecture, Collaboration, User Input, Responsive, Usability, and Trust. Intranets are designed to help employees work more efficiently, and in order for a site to be more effective, the employee journey of the intranet experience must be in place. Help is always the trigger of the intranet experience. With extensive content, search capabilities, collaboration abilities, and responsive design, users will all be ultimately lead to trust the intranet website. This is the true meaning of a reliable, useful, and user-centered intranet.