Bringing content home

With resources and management support behind you it’s not difficult to create a state-of-the-art intranet with the latest functionality, but ignoring the importance of the content you publish and its intended user will render your system redundant. Mike Parsons, Jonathan Haber and Mark Morrell discuss the key areas of search and navigation, user-focused content, and accessibility.

Seeing clearly in the content jungle

Medium to large organisations regularly struggle to decide what employees want on an intranet. The irony is that most companies forget about their employees when building an intranet. A common symptom is when the intranet structure is the same as the organisation chart. This is a business-to-employee model and produces limited results.

I plan to turn this model upside down and approach content from the employee’s angle. By approaching content in this way the entire decision-making process becomes clear and specific. Further more, by empowering the employee with the right content an intranet delivers quantifiable cost savings and improved productivity.

As a private network within the enterprise, an intranet can be many things. In this discussion we focus on workforce optimisation and productivity. We are seeing a trend of ERP, CRM and supply-chain management initiatives moving towards an intranet-based environment, which is logical if organisations really want to reap the rewards of integration.

Putting the user first is not a new paradigm. Sellers have always tried to meet the needs of potential customers. So applying this notion to an intranet is just common sense. Alan Cooper and Jacob Nielsen are promoters of this approach called ‘user experience’. Cooper has developed the goal-directed methodology to improve software and interactive products. Nielsen has travelled the world telling website managers to build with the customer in mind.

The employee-focused intranet approach

The following steps allow you to determine what employees need and what the intranet will look like. Many organisations will need to tailor some components to their specific needs, however this outline will cover most issues. This process should include members of HR, management, administration, IT and other relevant units. This is not a single event but an ongoing and organic process – content managers should constantly evaluate user’s intranet needs.

Quick scan – Know your users and their needs

- Profile your employees – How many, where, when, what, why;

- Interview – Talk to a typical’ employee from each part of the organisation;

- Needs analysis – Define types of employees, main priorities and problems;

Benchmark – Find best practice from others

- Investigate – Competitors, industry and similar companies;

- Touch –Use best-practice intranets from partners and vendors;

- Evaluate – Compare best practice to your needs;

Concept – Visualise and experience your intranet

- Define – personas and scenarios;

- Design – information architecture;

- Create – mock ups and build a demo.

Lastly, employee-focused intranets have some common traits in the content that they offer. For your intranet checklist I suggest these top-five popular content items:

Employee directory;
Expenses;
Daily lunch menu;
Product and service information;
Templates.

So if you’re in the middle of the content jungle, don’t worry. Approach content from a user’s perspective and you’ll easily navigate your way towards a more efficient and productive workforce.

Mike Parsons is an e-business consultant at Partners in Perspective. He can be contacted at mike@partnership.com.

Searching for answers

The refrain from our associates was, “Search doesn’t work.” It was true that entering words into the search field would not return meaningful results. But when both the technical and communications people got together to look closely at what prompted the chorus, we found that adjusting the focus away from the search engine brought the rest of the landscape into perspective. By stepping back we found that the search engine was only one of several elements that help people find what they need. If the instructions to users are unclear (or incorrect), then there is little chance that people will know how to construct effective search strings.

The best way to illustrate this is to imagine three overlapping rings. Each one represents one ingredient that, when combined, form an information-retrieval strategy. The three overlapping rings serve to explain how three important aspects of search are interrelated and need to work together to enable people to find information.

The publishing resource centre on our intranet has a section for communicating and educating people on the three elements of our information retrieval strategy:

Content management – Publishers must set up information on their pages and sites so that people can find what they’re looking for. Educating our publishers about the importance of their role was key. We developed standards for defining page descriptions, key words and other metadata fields;
Users – Site users need to know the best way to use navigation and search tools to find information. We first expelled the belief that the only way to find things was through the search facility. An explanation of how the navigation system works appears within this section together with the proper methods for constructing and refining search strings;
Technical – Steps taken behind the scenes define and build the framework for effective search and navigation. This section contains just enough information for the non-technical person to understand the concept of search catalogues, and how often they are updated.

The chorus isn’t entirely silent now, but the refrain has changed. No longer are people quick to blame the search engine anymore. Instead we recognise that by understanding how all areas function, we can work together to help people find the information they’re looking for.

Jonathan Haber is intranet content manager at Marriott Hotels. He can be contacted at jonathan.haber@marriott.com.

Increase your usage by ten per cent

Straining to find new ways to increase traffic? Want to tap into new audiences? Missing out on users of alternative technology? There is one way you can achieve all of this: make your site accessible.

You think that your site is accessible already? People can see the images, click on headings, check banners and use the site. But what about all those IT-savvy people with a disability, such as impaired sight or reduced physical movement who need special browsers to use internet and intranet sites? Estimates vary on how many people are affected, but about 5 - 15 per cent of the population is a good guide.

The only way these users can ‘see’ and use your site is to make sure their browser, such as Jaws text browsers, can read the code on each page and navigate using this to the content they need. This is easier (and cheaper) to do when designing and planning your site than retro-fitting existing pages.

Following the W3C guidelines at www.w3.org/WAI/ you can make it easy to navigate to the right links, labelling clearly and ensuring images have an alt tag with a text alternative.

You will have immediately increased your potential new users by around ten per cent. Research also shows that converting existing accessible code to be used for WAP and PDAs, for example, is easily scalable, giving you more options for little effort.

Hopefully this all makes good business sense to you and will encourage you to think about making your site more accessible. But, an extra incentive is that it’s also a legal requirement under Section 21 of the 1995 Disability Discriminations Act, which came into force from 1 October 1999.

Further guidance can be found at the Royal National Institute for the Blind’s (RNIB) site at www.rnib.org.uk.

Mark Morrell is online information strategy manager at BT. He can be contacted at mark.morrell@bt.com.