Perhaps some of you are doing a regular spring cleaning in your home. But it is also useful to regularly clean up your intranet, especially if there are no plans for a platform upgrade or a merger with another intranet. How much dust have your documents collected? How many contributors have left the company? How many Team Sites have been left unattended? All this unmanaged content keeps showing up in search results and taking up disk space. And remember, the usability of your intranet decreases with increasing amount of content! In this post I will focus on the reasons for spring-cleaning your intranet; next post will contain some guidelines on how to do it.

Source: mydigitalworkplace.wordpress.com Posted by http://ellenvanaken.wordpress.com/ 82 days, 14 hours, 56 minutes ago

The game is changing and there’s a major shift happening in the way we design websites. I’ve been in endless meetings with heated discussions over website or intranet navigation and information architecture. Should the navigation be aligned following departmental structures, product lines or copied from the competitors?

Once the navigation has been decided, the actual implementation often turns out to be complex and expensive. Subsequently, online analytics has unfortunately shown that the navigation is...

Source: jboye.com Posted by admin 246 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes ago

Normally when we work on an intranet it is to provide direct business benefits; to find effective and efficient ways to improve company profits. “Let’s publish more brochures to help win work” or “Let’s do a round of health and safety awareness to limit our liability”. Studies abound, however, linking employee satisfaction with an improved financial bottom line. In the book, The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want, for instance, author David Sirota and colleagues draw on 30 years of research to conclude that enthusiastic employees consistently outproduce and outperform their less satisfied counterparts. The white paper Effects of Employee Satisfaction on Company Financial Performance links to further case studies and research.

So what are some key initiatives management can undertake to improve employee satisfaction? The Inc.com article 7 Ways to Improve Employee Satisfaction covers some of the basics companies can look to; following those principles here are some ways you can apply them on your intranet...

Source: informationhandyman.com Posted by http://adampope.myopenid.com/ 262 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes ago

Often used to discover the thoughts of users regarding ‘where’ they would like to find topics on the intranet, card sorting is a low-tech exercise that helps people influence the design of a site.

By collecting real-world information based on people’s expectations, rather than relying on the design or intranet team’s logic and wishes, a site can be built that is people-centred and meets users’ needs.

Source: kilobox.net Posted by admin 378 days, 5 hours, 10 minutes ago

The cause of most confusing menus and links stems from organizational language and thinking. Take, for example, the FAQ. Over the years, I’ve found that most customers don’t know what a FAQ is. That certainly surprised me because I thought everyone knew that FAQ meant Frequently Asked Questions, just like everyone knows that the logo links to the homepage.

However, the FAQ has a deeper problem. From a customers’ perspective it is essentially a useless link. It is a classic example of organization-centric language.

Source: www.ragan.com Posted by bee 425 days, 6 hours, 20 minutes ago

Where I work, we don't have usability labs, eye tracking equipment or even webcams or screen capturing software to test information architecture designs with people. Resorting to budget user testing techniques can still provide valuable insights which in turn create recommendations for improvements.

I've had two days of user testing this week, both in-house and out on sites. I've met people from the police force, probation officers, lawyers and barristers and more. A good mixed bag of users from different sectors and it's also nice to do testing where people usually work.

Source: uxdiary.blogspot.com Posted by bee 437 days, 5 hours, 18 minutes ago

A large percentage of our employees work remotely. How can we engage and communicate with these employees better?

This is a great question, and one that many companies face (particularly distribution and retail companies). The problem is usually around access to the intranet. More often than not, remote working employees are only less informed and feel less connected to the organisation because they have very limited access to the company intranet – not because they want to. It means that they don’t have the same opportunity to find critical information, voice concerns and suggest new ideas as their office-based colleagues.

Source: www.interact-intranet.com Posted by InteractIntranet 466 days, 16 hours, 13 minutes ago

A primary rule of web management is: 'Do as I do, not as I say'. So why do we ask people to say what they're doing during usability tests?

About a year ago I listened to a university professor explain concisely how he liked to use a particular website. "Now when I have this type of problem to solve I would always go to this section of the website." And he clicked on a link. "See how well it's organized to solve this sort of problem," he stated enthusiastically.

Source: www.gerrymcgovern.com Posted by bee 534 days, 6 hours, 16 minutes ago

The idea behind my navigation stress test is to ask some really hard questions about your web site navigation to see if it can "pass". It is called a "stress test" because most pages will not pass. The failures may be serious, or they may not matter at all, but at least by performing the test you will have discussed the navigation issues and made conscious design decisions.

The questions are detailed ways to ask about 3 basic concerns users often have upon arriving at a page:

• Where am I?
• What's here?
• Where can I go?

Source: instone.org Posted by support 571 days, 14 hours, 28 minutes ago

I have often said that intranets hold up a mirror to the organisations they serve. Their purpose, content, structure and navigation must all reflect the unique contexts that they sit in.

This can be seen in the top-level menu items of intranets. If there was one “right” answer, we’d see the same menu items across many sites; or at least, more similarities than differences. Scan your eyes over the collection of menus above: is this what you see?

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by bee 579 days, 16 hours, 53 minutes ago