Designing Compelling Intranets

An Intranet should be a vital business tool and an important communication channel between us and our colleagues.

Email is pretty poor for communications - the average open rate for email is around 20-something percent. The half-life of an email is around 3.4 hours. So my first point is that there has been an understandable shift away from push communication to pull communication. In order to realise the benefit we have to create an intranet that is vital to people's working lives and day-to-day activity.

The best way to achieve that is by understanding how our colleagues work through contextual design research - by getting inside their heads and understanding their latent needs (not just taking their reported needs at face value).

If we understand their real needs and we understand how their expectations of the Intranet will be driven by the trends in consumer technology then we can anticipate their future needs.

The intranet models that exist are useful abstractions as we imagine the future functionality but we shouldn't forget to design for usage, evolution, unpredicted needs and entropy.

This talk was first presented at Glasgow University to their Internal Communications and IT community.

Transcript

1. ModernHuman. MH Designing Compelling Intranets. Presented by Paul-Jervis Heath on Friday 30 August 2013. Photo credit Flickr user mhaithaca - http://bit.ly/16KLrU9
2. ~20% email open rate Time Click Density ~3.4h half-life of an email
3. There has been a shift away from push communication to pull communication.
4. Photo credit Flickr user Great Beyond - http://bit.ly/16oYU3C Intranets can become a destination.
5. Creating the default starting place for IBM employees…
6. Administrators Academics Students
7. Indifference Hygiene Factors (Usability) Differentiation (Experience) Understandable Interesting Useful Compelling Indispensable Advocacy
8. Focus groups are not design research.
9. Usability testing is vital but it will not uncover users’ needs.
10. image of mental model
13. Getting inside peoples’ heads is the only way to uncover their latent needs.
14. Consumer devices continue to raise our users’ expectations of technology.
15. 79% 70% use their smartphones to help with shopping use their smartphones whilst standing in a store
16. The rate of adoption is accelerating (Time to Reach 150 Million Users) 89 years 38 years 14 years 7 years 5 years
17. Cambridge University’s website just became available on a mobile. Google are about to put the internet directly into your right eye.
18. Uni ed Presentation Of Services Digital Photo credit Flickr user evan.chakroff - http://bit.ly/1ak8HMs © Wearable Mobile Dedicated Device e.g. kindle or kiosk Tablet Large Displays
19.  ✎ Managed Collaboration Social Photo credit Flickr user Phillie Casablanca - http://bit.ly/18ReHsh
20. Refer, Learn, Publish Social Collaboration Managed Real-time, unpredictable Creative, Co-ordinated, Goal Oriented Authoritative, Stable, Reference Work, Create, Do Discover, Discuss
22. Functionality News Content + +
24. Centralised. Decentralised. Distributed.
25. • Identifying the right applications can turn intranets into an indispensable tool. • Design research helps you identify the right balance of functionality, news and content. • Entropy is a fact of life, it can be designed for. • Centralised, decentralised and distributed models can be applied to information architecture, content strategy and governance. Wait. What was that again?
26. Photo credit Flickr user djking - http://bit.ly/13ObNXf
27. Paul-Jervis Heath paul@modernhuman.co @pauljervisheath ModernHuman. We use human-centred design to help businesses invent their future. We’re a design practice & innovation consultancy. Find out more at http://modernhuman.co Photo credit Flickr user andreaskopp - http://bit.ly/12yywna We love our ideas to spread. That’s why this presentation is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) license. This license allows you and others to remix, tweak, and build upon this work non- commercially. When you do you must acknowledge us, Modern Human, and license any new creations under the identical terms. When in doubt, just ask us. We won’t bite.