How healthy is your intranet?

You’ve been feeling low, you have no energy and you’re starting to get worried. You go to the doctor who, after checking a few vital parameters, tells you there’s nothing major wrong and prescribes some medication that will help you get back to normal. We would never dream of taking chances with our health so we get regular check ups and, if the worst comes to the worst, we hope that anything major is caught early enough to be able to do something about it.

This is just common sense isn’t it?  Yet organizations can expend huge resources on their intranets and communication systems but generally have no idea of how healthy they are at any one time. This contributes to the all too common phenomenon of intranet boom and bust. Someday it just dawns on everyone that their intranet is not fit for purpose but shouldn’t they have seen it coming? Unfortunately it can be hard unless you have a system in place which effectively provides a regular health checkup for your intranet.

This post provides a methodology which will enable you to do just that – the Intranet Heath Check.

Designing intranet structures – Mapping and continually improving your intranet (Part 5)

In this fifth and final post on Designing Intranet Structures I’ll be looking at what should happen once you have agreed the structure of your new or re-designed intranet with your users and stakeholders – mapping and continuously improving your intranet.

Designing intranet structures – defining and re-defining your intranet structure (Part 4)

In Part 3 I discussed how the design of URLs can play a big part in forming the initial structure of your new or re-designed intranet. In this post I’ll explain how users and stakeholders can contribute to defining the structure, why iteration is the key to a good intranet structure, why content is important and why thinking of the future is important.

Designing intranet structures – Designing your URLs (Part 3)

In all of the posts and articles I’ve read about intranets I’ve never heard much mention of URL design yet this can be a key approach in designing your intranet and will also permanently help your users in finding the content they need. If you’re worried that this might sound a little complicated don’t be.  The approach I’m proposing in this post is simple and low tech.

Designing intranet structures – using system maps (Part 2)

This post details the first step towards designing or re-designing your intranet – the system map. This map will define your intranet domains and give the first overall view of the domains that make up your intranet and the things that go in them.

Before any system map can be compiled it is important that in depth user and stakeholder research is carried out as well as a content inventory (see Content Value Analysis). The analysis of these activities will contribute towards populating the system map.

Designing intranet structures – An Overview (Part 1)

This is the first of a series of posts exploring a methodology for creating the best possible intranet structure based on research and iterative conversations with users and stakeholders. This post gives an overview of the methodology and subsequent posts will explore parts of the methodology in more depth.

The crucial question – what is your intranet for?

A good friend of mine recently asked me to present some ideas to the charity he works for who will shortly be re-designing their intranet. As they were still considering their options I reviewed the Lean Intranet presentation I was going to give and realised that there was a crucial question missing.

What is your intranet for?

This eventually became the central proposition of the presentation. Defining what your intranet is for is a necessary consideration before any progress can be made in attaining the Lean Intranet or any type of  intranet improvement. Not defining what your intranet is for is, in fact, the greatest of the intranet wastes.

Content Centred Design – A methodology (Part 2)

In Part 1 I discussed the importance of considering content during the whole of the design process and the need to give it the same weight that the user through UCD/UX currently receives in most web projects. So how might this be accomplished?

I recognize that all web projects are unique is some way and any approach has to be tailored, so in this post I’m going to provide a fairly high level methodology, a methodology however that gives users and content the same emphasis. It has now become the norm that the needs and wants of users are considered at every stage of a project. I want content to have the same recognition.

Content Centred Design for websites – an overview (Part 1)

This post is about content and how it should be recognized as a major player in any web design or intranet project. I have written about the concept of content centred design before and how online versions of hard copy content objects can lead to a much diminished user experience. I used the online dictionary as an example of this.

I wrote then that -

‘Content must be viewed as a stakeholder’

‘content has a structure and a purpose which is independent of the user or web designer’

Nothing I have seen in the time since I wrote the above has changed my mind. Content must be considered as important a stakeholder in the design process as the user in order to ensure a balanced, rational approach to any web design project. By ignoring this fact designers and web teams are overlooking an essential element that would contribute to a better final product.  By either ignoring content, or leaving any consideration to near the end of a project, the final design has a high likelihood of being sub-optimal.

Better web statistics analysis using Statistical Process Control (SPC) – Part 2 a methodology

In Part 1 I give an overview of SPC. Statistical Process Control (SPC) is a way of accurately predicting what an entire data group will look like based on small samples.  This is important as everything varies over time and, if the data group happens to be web statistics, it may be vital to know whether a rise or fall in, for instance the number of vistors your web site or intranet has had in a week, may just be a part of the normal variation or is due to some significant change.

In this post I’ll show you how you can define the ‘normal’ variation for any web statistic. I’ll also give examples and show you how easy SPC is to use  and how powerful a tool it can be in aiding analysis of your web data.