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.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
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