Can everything and anything be included on the landing page of the sections of a Corporate Intranet? If this is the current state of the Intranet it would only lead to clutter and confusion.It will eventually lose focus and defeat the purpose of the Intranet.
How often do Intranet managers consider getting feedback on the layout and quality of information on their Intranets?In my experience I have found corporate Intranets with sections that really dont reflect the image of the company/firm, relevance of information, consistency in usage of fonts, colors, information structures eventually leaving their users frustrated and helpless when they go about finding some good information for a crucial engagement or project.
What Intranet Managers can do to address this is:
- Get feedback on the current state of the Intranet in terms of content quality, layout, navigation, and consistency
- Find out if your users visit the site at all. If they do, was it easy to find the site.
- Run surveys on how users feel about their experience with the Intranet in terms of ease of navigation and quality of content. This can be done by internally organising a group of volunteers which is the most common practice or use the 'elevator technique' as described by Patrick C. Walsh in one of his highly insightful blogs on Intranet and Knowledge Creation. I found the Elevator Technique of surveying particularly interesting in the corporate scenario.
- Create teams to test and give reports on what they find good or bad about the sites they visit on the Intranet
- Simplify as much as possible. Describe why the content featured on the site is important in a few but crisp words.
- Reduce the usage of Acronyms
These are a few things that Intranet managers could do in the direction of making corporate information sites usable and effective.
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4 comments:
Hi vivek
great post...intranet and say any portal or a site needs to remain clutter free...I was watching a program about google on their 11th anniversary and the mentioned the same thing...Lesser the clutter, more popular a portal )
Google sort of changed the concept of a home page for search engines back in the late 90's (99-00). Google was conducting a survey on the look and appeal of its search page. It was funny that people participating in the survey were waiting for the page to load (when it was up already). They were in for a surprise when google page looked clean and just had the search bar (compared to yahoo, ask and other engines, google has kept its search page free of clutter and and we all know where it is today!)
Nice to see you post something after a long time!
Thanks Sudha,
Good perspective of how Google started off as an innovative search engine at a time when the world was flocking to search engines for the quickest possible way to get to the right content.
It needs innovation and R&D at any corporate entity to offer an Intranet to its employees that is free of clutter and be focused on placing the right content at the right place for faster and easier access whether its an Intranet homepage or a micro-site dedicated to one particular function/group/business area.
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Thanks. Only wish I could write more. I haven't been penning anything for a while now. However, my efforts are on to come up with some ideas. Thanks for visiting my page.
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