When you look at intranet sites, what do you think? What makes for a good intranet experience? Typically, I hear things like “it has to have an intuitive navigation” or something to do with the aesthetics of the site. How well a site is organized is important, right? Sure, that makes sense.
Thinking about it now, I wonder, have sites really changed a lot in the last 10 years? There have been some new bells and whistles; new shiny objects that made them run faster, look prettier, animate them, or something like this. In the end though, intranet sites are generally the same. They typically have a deep hierarchy of information that seems to make sense to someone at some point, maybe organized by department or function. After launch, they seem to fall short of being that potential revelation envisioned when everyone looked at the mock-ups of the new pretty graphics and layout.
Let’s think about this in another way. Remember the VCR? For some reason, the clock on the VCR was notorious for users having difficulty setting it to the correct time. It seems silly today, but someone like my grandmother saw the VCR revolution come and go, and she never once learned how to set the correct time on it.
I see parallels with the VCR and intranet here. Engineers and usability experts spent years and countless revisions to their products and instruction manuals trying to make the process of setting the time on a VCR easy and intuitive to do. It’s a big deal, because if your VCR didn’t have the correct time, you couldn’t take advantage of features like the setting the timer to record programs. If you weren’t taking advantage of the advanced features, you might not buy a newer VCR later when one is released with more exciting new features.
The result was engineers and usability experts spending countless hours redesigning the product and writing better instructions for these users, adding better prompts and wizards on the screen hoping to guide users to set the VCR’s time. No matter what they did though, every time I visited my grandmother, her VCR continued to flash “12:00″, and I would have to set the time for her.
Eventually they finally had a thought, which must have been something like, “let’s see if we can find a way to have the VCR figure out what time it is and just set the clock automatically without bothering the user at all.” Now they finally uncovered a usable state. The result: this became the standard for all VCRs and future devices like BlueRays and PVRs! (When was the last time you had to set the time on something besides maybe your car radio?)
It seems that we are doing for intranets today like they used to do for VCRs. Think of some of the motivators for an intranet project: usually it has something to do with the intranet being in some state of a mess, content is not organized, people can’t find information, and no one really uses it. Then we deploy some usability experts and information architects to plan the intranet correctly this time. Thus, the project is justified and everyone dreams of all the wonderful things a new intranet will do for their company. I’ve even heard ludicrous statistics like “information workers spend up to X hours each week searching for information” justifying how bad things are and what value they assume a new intranet would deliver. I am typically suspicious of these numbers and studies, and more so when they are just incorporated in to a project vision.
To me, it feels like we send in these information architects and usability experts to do what the VCR people did years ago: trying to tweak a challenging structure to make users adapt to it. Think about it like this: after all these years of redoing intranets and spending so much time on organizing content, wouldn’t we as an industry have figured it out by now if this were the right track? Sure, there are incremental improvements, but with the exponential rate content and information is being created and added to intranets, this just isn’t sustainable. The clock continues to flash “12:00″ for too many intranets.
It’s time for a major shift, to look at a new paradigm. What if an intranet could set its own time? Instead of making a user navigate some crazy menu or deep hierarchy to go to the information, what if we brought the information to them?
Picture an experience where a user, any user, has a single landing page with a couple focus areas. You design each focus area around some core focus that you abstracted enough so they are applicable to anyone in the company. Yet, each user has their own experience in these areas. The page surfaces information that is important or relevant to the user within their given context; in other words, connecting the right information to the right people, at just the right time. I call this whole concept and guiding principle knowledge discovery.
We need information architects and usability experts to drive this revolution, this paradigm shift, uncovering the personalization answers and building out a completely new experience built around knowledge discovery. We are just burning cycles having them try and figure out a new more effective way to teach users how to discover content using the same constructs.
Hi Steve,
Your post reminds me of an experience while implementing some basic team sites with SharePoint few years ago. After some meetings, I saw a trend where people were putting the focus on this usability thing instead of the real value of the intened site which is its content and the facilities to easily discover it.
After few discussions and lot of time being spent with no real value toward the core objective, I came up with a new approach – I’ve build a series of site models with basic stuff (library templates, list templates, etc.) and as a “bonus”, I told then that they can select the theme they want from the basic theme set. That was the only discussion possible in the area of usability
Ultimately, they came to the conclusion that the real value is the content, as opposed to a fully-thought look and feel with all the bells and whistles of the day
I still believe that navigation and usability have their importance, especially for extranet sites, but for internal/departmental site where the focus is information sharing, I’m a strong advocate of keeping things simple and put efforts on the architecture of the information (taxonomy, metadata, discoverability, etc.)