Tim Walters, Ph.D., is a senior analyst at Forrester Research. He recently posted an article Top 10 Tips for Pumping-Up Intranet Adoption. There have been a lot of blog posts and articles surrounding a successful intranet launch, including our own post “Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Intranet”.
Tim’s top 10 tips resonate and he has provided some great points to consider.
- Launch User-Centric, Participatory Research: As a first step, begin to gather user input — and develop field skills — with interviews, card sorting exercises and scenario observations.
- Use Available Metrics to Set the Baseline: Site analytics from the current intranet tell you who uses it, for how long and what parts are avoided.
- Analyze Intranet Help Desk Records to Identify Top Problem Areas: Doing so provides direct insight into the main hurdles to wider adoption.
- Interview Users to Discover Needs: However, keep in mind that people often describe how they would like to work rather than how they actually do.
- Observe and Record Users to Study Work Behaviors: It’s the best way to understand both particular work habits and uncover design flaws that remain hidden from the experts on the design team.
- Engage Users to Reveal Organizational Habits and Priorities: For example, card sorting helps to discover how they organize, access and manipulate information.
- Create Personas to Guide Design Decisions: Personas provide key information about users’ goals, attitudes and behaviors that is required for effective interaction design.
- Deploy Ongoing Usability Testing: A spectrum of users should repeatedly test paper prototypes, wireframe mockups and coded development interfaces in contexts that encourage them to give utterly frank feedback.
- Identify “Carrots” that Can Help Wean Users Off of Old Methods: You can encourage change by presenting users with clear improvements to their current work habits.
- Conduct a Heuristic Test: It’s difficult for intranet team members to “forget” their knowledge of the system, so heuristic tests are more valuable when conducted by outside evaluators.
I love tip #3. The power of an intranet comes to light when you can help employees solve problems and assist in their daily tasks. What a great place to start in identifying applications and tools to use on your intranet. The benefit is in reduced Help Desk calls and supporting a collaborative self-help environment that can add a lot of ROI savings to your bottom line.
A lot of Tim’s tips include getting out there and talking to your employees and departments, but be prepared to fine-tune after the launch of your intranet. Planning, research and concept meetings can help to guide and outline goals and execution before your intranet launch, but how your employees interact with the live intranet will differ from how they conceptually determine their needs. Keep a close eye on intranet statistics as usage grows. Look for patterns and different ways that users approach and find content.
A great resource in what employees want out of their intranets is The Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC). The WIC conducts regular studies on what users find valuable on their intranets, and “finding instructions for completing work tasks” is an intranet quality that they value the most. http://cibasolutions.typepad.com/wic/page/2/
Keep the intranet navigation intuitive and simple. Include tools for employees to customize and personalize their own intranet experiences like our Employee Hub. You can help employees to get started by pushing site alerts based on group or department designation. Be sure to encourage employees to set up their own personal hubs and create widgets to display content that they care about and want to interact with.
And for those of you (like me) who need to look up “Heuristic” (tip #10) here is the shortened version of Wikipedia’s definition: an adjective for experience-based techniques that help in problem solving, learning and discovery. Sounds like a good core value to adopt for your intranet experience.
