Intranet Redesign

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Permalink Reply by Rajat Bhardwaj on December 9, 2010 at 9:20am

Hi Pushpa,
While designing Intranet, you need to take care of following things:
a) Intranet caters to a limited user's and as compared to internet, the tasks of these users are very limited.
b) User's refer to Intranet for information on Business as well as user's so you will have to balance the information architecture accordingly.
c) Every user would have a different need on Intranet, so personalization feature could be provided for user's to choose the information they want to see or interact with.

Let me know if that helps!

Rajat

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Permalink Reply by Dawn Barber on February 18, 2011 at 8:53pm

Hello Pushpa,

A great resource is NNG's annual intranet design report. This report locates some of the best intranet sites available and reports on the applications that are found within these sites. This is great if you just want to get some ideas on what types of applications are on intranets.

Hope this helps (I was the UX on a new intranet at a past company... it took about 2.5 years to get it to a place where at least every end user saw a perceived value in it). Hang in there.

Take care,

Dawn

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Permalink Reply by Caroleigh Deneen on February 25, 2011 at 1:21pm

These are not Intranet specific, but quite interesting. Cameron Chapman has compiled a list of research-based guidelines to keep in mind in any website development project. Some of these challenge some commonly followed best-practice guidelines. Cameron Chapman's list includes:

1. Forget the "Three-Click Rule"
2. Enable Content Skimming by Using an F-Shaped Pattern
3. Don't Make User Wait: Speed Up Your Website
4. Make Your Content Easily Readable
5. Don't Worry about "The Fold" and Vertical Scrolling
6. Place Important Content on the Left of a Web Page
7. Whitespace of Text Affects Readability
8. Small Details Make a Huge Difference
9. Don't Rely on Search as a Crutch to Bad Navigation
10. Your Home Page isn't as Important as You Think

Full article published here: http://sixrevisions.com/usabilityaccessibility/10-usability-tips-ba...

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Permalink Reply by R Jaini on May 12, 2011 at 6:59am

Hi Pushpa,

 

Here are some guidelines:

 

• The most common way to structure an intranet site is according to an organisation's structure - its departments. The only real way to be confident in your site's structure is to conduct card sorting sessions, which will actually find out how employees perceive/think about the site's content.
• User should be able to create 'intranet profiles' which contain online bookmarks that they'll be able to save and then access from any computer.
• You should always provide a dedicated central employee directory on your intranet and access to this directory should be provided from every page on the site and it should include all employees' details
• I have read in one of the article, it says from usability testing studies is that an organisation's intranet should be easily and quickly distinguishable from its public-facing website (corporate website). Failing to do this can lead to employees becoming confused as to which 'world they are in'.

Hope this information helps

 

Thanks

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