Posts Tagged ‘mania’
February 11, 2013
‘A man once had a garden. He grew vegetables for a living and liked it well enough. His garden had high walls all around it so no one could look at his garden and see how he grew his vegetables but he never thought about the walls much, the walls had always been there and probably always would. So every day he worked in his garden and did the best he could. His produce sold okay, not great but it provided a living, and so he kept doing what he had always done before.
Then one day a salesman knocked at the gardener’s door. With a glib smile he showed the gardener what he said was ‘the future of gardening’. ‘Why bother with lots of tools when you only really need one and here it is!’ With a flourish he pulled a sheet off a huge gold coloured machine. ‘This is it, the Golden Machine. It will do everything that a walled garden needs, for walled gardens like yours are really special and so must have special machines. Look here are some endorsements’.
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Posted in Innovation, intranets | 2 Comments »
Tags: internal information, intranets, mania
October 7, 2012
In Part 1 of this post I discussed how we could do away with the traditional homepage altogether and restructure an intranet with the focus being on the My Stuff section. In this approach the My Stuff section will not only contain personal data and tasks such as salary details and booking time off but also a personalised view of relevant content held in the other sections. Of course the question then arises of how this might be done. I am going to suggest some approaches but I’m hoping that this post might start a conversation and other, probably better, ideas as to how My Stuff might be made to work will be suggested. The probability is that no one solution will work perfectly but then again we shouldn’t be looking for perfection. If we only make 50% of the content users regularly need easily available in My Stuff then we will have saved out users a massive amount of time and frustration
Let’s start with a very low tech approach…
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Posted in content strategy, Enterprise-wide Information Systems (EIS), information architecture, intranets, Tools and Techniques | 1 Comment »
Tags: content strategy, enterprise information architecture, information architecture, intranet content, intranet design, intranet homepage, intranet strategy, intranet structure, intranets, linked data, mania
October 2, 2012
There’s a conference being held in a few days and one of its features is Do you have the best intranet homepage? This got me thinking and I had a look at some sample homepages from ‘award winning intranets’ and, to be honest, I felt vaguely depressed. It took me a while to figure out why, which I did with the help of one of Jakob Nielsen’s posts from a few years ago. It showed a composite image of ten intranet homepages which showed a strong commonality and the most recent ones don’t look much different.
It has been claimed that the homepage reflects the whole intranet, if that is so then all intranets are overly complicated and stuff content packages that have no relevance to each other into a big bag labelled ‘intranet’.
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Posted in content strategy, Enterprise-wide Information Systems (EIS), information architecture, intranets, Tools and Techniques | 11 Comments »
Tags: content strategy, enterprise information architecture, information architecture, intranet content, intranet design, intranet homepage, intranet strategy, intranet structure, intranets, mania
April 29, 2012
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.
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Posted in intranets, Tools and Techniques, user research | 2 Comments »
Tags: intranet audit, intranet health check, intranet stakeholders, intranet users, intranets, mania
November 6, 2011
Intranets don’t work. Why? Because not enough resources are given to them to ensure they have a chance of success. Why aren’t resources made available? Because intranets don’t work. A vicious circle is born.
In this post I’m attempting to provide an approach that may help intranet teams to make the case for better resources and to break out of this vicious circle for good.
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Posted in intranets, Projects | 6 Comments »
Tags: intranet improvement, intranet improvements, intranet planning, intranet plans, intranet projects, intranet resources, intranets, kaizen, mania
August 5, 2011
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.
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Posted in Design, information architecture, intranets, Tools and Techniques | 1 Comment »
Tags: Design, improving intranets, information architecture, intranet design, intranet improvements, intranet maps, intranet stakeholders, intranet structure, intranet users, intranets, mania
July 31, 2011
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.
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Posted in content strategy, Design, information architecture, intranets, Knowledge, Tools and Techniques, URLs | Comments Off on Designing intranet structures – defining and re-defining your intranet structure (Part 4)
Tags: content, defining design, defining intranets, Design, design of URLs, information architecture, intranet design, intranet maps, intranet stakeholders, intranet structure, intranet users, intranets, mania, url design, URLs
June 19, 2011
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.
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Posted in Design, information architecture, intranets, Tools and Techniques, URLs | 4 Comments »
Tags: Design, design of URLs, intranet design, intranet maps, intranet structure, intranets, mania, url design, URLs
May 15, 2011
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.
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Posted in Design, information architecture, intranets, Tools and Techniques | 4 Comments »
Tags: Design, intranet design, intranet maps, intranet structure, intranet system maps, intranets, mania