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Quick Takes on Intranet

 

The Power of Tufte Design Ideas

Professor Edward Tufte of Yale University has written three books on information design. Read these books. Just go to Amazon and do a keyword search on "tufte" and you will see the books. His latest is "Visual Explanations". These are not web site design books. They are about how to design and display information so it can be immediately useful to your target audience. How to grab complex data from that internal database and present it via your intranet in a powerful, user-friendly way.

These books are heavy but very enjoyable reading. The illustrations are incredible. After reading his books you will immediately think of new ways to design your intranet home page. You will want to simplify the entry page to your core applications like the employee phone book. Believe me on this.

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The Phone Book Rules !!

The employee phone book is still the killer application of your intranet. But many companies stop development of the phone book after delivering a first generation application with keyword search on lastname,firstname. This is a mistake.

The intranet phone book should be upgraded with added functionality every three months. You should have an active beta testing program of second and third generation phone books.

Examples of killer second generation features are:

A "smart" entry form, that allows combination search, partial word search, and sounds like search on such data fields as: name, cost center name, location and title. For example, your phone book should handle this: "I met someone named Felicity on the 5th floor, not sure of the spelling of her name".

"Associated" data should be served up to your user without even asking. For example, keyword search on last name of an employee results in employee record displayed with added bonus of a link that says "Click here to view everyone in this department".

Users can update information and add additional fields to the data. Your phone book is powerful enough to allow the employee to add pager numbers, a short bio, and instructions on back-up people in their department to contact for support.

The phone book application is never done. It can always be improved.

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Best Intranet Content - the Practical and the Simple

The most valuable content on your intranet is information that is immediately helpful to your users. Sounds simple, but many times the most practical information is ignored on company intranets. There is often too much attention given to converting existing paper-based internal communications and not thinking of new, but very simple stuff that people need.

For example, these are examples of the simple and the practical that will have your users cheering your intranet:

You get the idea.

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How To Organize an Intranet Support Team

Create a core team of your best people in your IT group, probably best if the head of the group reports directly to your CTO. Usually it is not hard to recruit top talent from within your organization to staff this group. The smart people want to work on the new technology and this stuff is fun.

Intranet is more an essential enterprise utility than simply a communications channel. Talented people with strong technology project management skills are required. Also, you need "doers", not staff people that are weak in understanding the potential of the technology. A typical Intranet Support Team for a large organization would look like this:

For a small organization the team would be:

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Web Site Design Wisdom

The best expert on good design for web pages is Jakob Nielsen, an engineer at Sun Microsystems. His views are based on real research with web users. Most of his opinions will make you reconsider how you design an intranet web page. Make sure you read these papers:

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Five Common Intranet Mistakes

1. Use frames for your intranet design standard.

All beginner webmasters like frames, but in a large company with diverse authoring skills, frames is too complex. Design standards should be very simple to permit decentralized authoring and ease of entry for departments with good content but not a lot of time to figure out frames. Plus frames complicates search functions, printing, and bookmarking.

2. Create lots of governance committees.

The best way to slow the normal progression of useful applications of intranet is to form too many large committees. One or two committees with strong leaders immersed in the technology and the vision of the technology is needed.

3. Focus too much time on architecture and selecting standard applications, not enough time on "doing it".

Architecture and selecting best applications are important, but don't confuse drawing boxes on a flip chart and forming a committee to select application standards with action to build your intranet. Action is seeing something on your intranet employees can use to be more productive.

4. Wait for senior management to lead the charge.

Most senior managers are too busy to browse the web. You have to go to them and give them a bulletproof demo of the technology and a business case. Then the light bulbs will go off. It takes one of two champions at the top to get the ball rolling. In some organizations, you need to aggressively recruit the best champions.

5. Get discouraged when momentum slows.

There is no straight line upward slope to intranet momentum in large, complex organizations. Expect in the first two years of development, some major setbacks, but over time steady progress in growth and employee support.

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Intranet Governance Committees

From my experience, the organization of committees (define charters, goals, deliverable...blah, blah, blah) is far less important than selecting a strong leader. If a committee has a narrow set of objectives, deadlines and strong leader, something may get done. Also, I recommend you start with one committee with one strong leader and have that group get too busy and need to spin off new subcommittees to tackle specific tasks. If you start with four and a couple of these start to drift, committee members will think the momentum behind intranet is failing.

Leadership skills are much more important than technical skills for these intranet committees. It helps if the leader is immersed in the technology, but look for people that know how to prepare for and run a meeting, not somebody that can argue the merits of NT vs Unix.

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Administration of Servers is Important

A common problem with young intranet is the administration of web servers is weak, creating a bottleneck for web authoring. Servers are usually setup by systems staff. They are usually skilled at the setup of the hardware and software but they will shy away from the important task of enabling authors to access and use the servers. Unskilled web authors will need regular trouble shooting help to get their content and light interactive applications (feedback forms, discussion forums) to work on the servers. You need to find ways to encourage the owners of the servers to spend time coaching the authors. Also, when you get added resources for servers support, make sure you build into the job specifications a definition of administration of servers that includes helping the web authors.

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More Problems with Frames

I work for a large bank and we have been testing a new design to our intranet using a frames design. A few comments:

1. Navigation frames use up precious real estate on your screen. If you have users running 640x480 with 14" monitors, this can be a real problem. Some or our best research content uses large tables and graphs and with frames you need to scroll left, right, up and down to view it. This is a bummer.

2. Frames makes bookmarking web pages one or two links deep in your content very difficult. There are ways to work around this, but the solutions are not easy.

3. If you have some Netscape 2.0 users, the navigation of frames can be awkward. You need to know to use the right mouse button key to go back a frame. Most users will hit the back button and jump back several pages. Netscape 3.0 and Explorer fix this problem.

4. Frames makes creating web pages that work, very difficult for the average intranet publisher. If you want to decentralize web authoring, don't use frames. If you want to limit web development to a few webmasters and these people are prepared to support all authoring- frames is the way to go.

5. If you are in a phase one type intranet, trying to add good content for demo purposes and win funding, but not much support at the moment...keep your design simple and no frames.

6. We find frames is a nice solution to replicate intRAnet content on your intERnet site. You place the content in the large frame and have different navigation frames for your intra and inter sites. That way you can maintain one set of content files with the same file names and directory structure in each site.

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Best Intranet Design Format

I would suggest the "newspaper" format of sites like C|NET as a good model for an early corporate intranet homepage design. If your site is like most early intranets, the content is uneven across the departments. You have a few good departmental level sites and a few good applications like the phone book. With the newspaper format, you can create a dynamic looking homepage with the best content displayed in an easy to find format . As you publish new content like latest news from corporate events or more "help" info about the intranet itself, you can announce these additions with the banner type graphics found in these kind of sites.

You can also build forms on this home page to provide direct access to functions like search or phone book applications.

The homepage should also have a prominent link to a Departments listing with a long list of all departments with sublinks to all departmental level content. That way all content can be accessed only one link deep from your home page.

The newspaper format helps you convey momentum for intranet to your users and shows immediately how intranet is different - more useful and enjoyable compared to other internal communication.

My homepage also uses this newspaper or magazine format.

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Last updated: December 2000

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