Hot answers tagged intranet
15
I find just using the colors as the demarkation a bit harder to understand. You can use a vertical rule to act as a placeholder for the goal, YTD or annual, depending on the day.
Your focus should be the goal and how much over or under you are. What I mean is there is not enough value of showing the actual numbers when you are just bother to about the ...
10
I had a very similar problem recently, and did some user testing on it. The main thing that came out of it was that we should avoid colours that have a common meaning. So yellow was a bad option, and green represented 'good', not 'acceptable'.
In the end we used grey as the neutral background colour, blue as the progress for 'expectation'; green as ...
9
They can be quite different. Off the top of my head:
Intranet users can use certain information elements a lot - and will want to be able to 'sort' the interface so they can quickly get at the bits they use regularly
Intranets can be vast & also dumping grounds for data which people will add - but then never get around to removing when its out of ...
7
I've encountered this issue many times across a couple of different places I've worked. Different people know the icon but refer to it differently. They may know the name but never refer to it in such a manner.
The one time I saw true uniformity across all departments was that it was given a specific name like "The Hub" or as Cape Cod Gunny answered, "The ...
5
I've been amazed to find that most of my intranet users are practically unaware that they're on a website or perhaps what that really means. My sample is of entirely non-technical users, unsurprisingly. In our case they accessed the application exclusively via a desktop icon we installed for them, so in a way it did function very much like a program.
As a ...
5
In my experience in larger organizations, the absolute ideal user interface for your intranet would be this:
What are you looking for?
[search term ] GO >>
The reasons for this are many:
most intranet use is hunting for one bit of information and then getting out
intranets tend to be highly fragmented spaces and ...
4
One of the biggest problems with companies these days is the tendency to give things grand titles that no one remembers. How many companies have a project Zeus or other projects known only by a three letter acronym? These titles are there to glorify those who do the work, not to explain it to others.
Intranet is a technical term. Xweb is a glorification ...
3
The less questions you ask, the better.
For personas development one should use interviews of the *ethnographic * kind (Google for it).
In these interviews the subject is encouraged to talk freely, unconstrained. This is the best way to detect their cravings and frustrations.
On the other hand, a set of preset questions implies a frame in the interviewer's ...
3
This isn't always easy and you will most likely have to adapt whatever practice you decide on to fit your specific situation. If you're unable to observe people, or you're experimenting to learn about how to capture the right information, surveys can help you gain an initial understanding.
The biggest problem with asking people why they do something is ...
3
My first question would be - why do you want to give the users a welcome page? Is it to give them context or some introduction/guidance/help?
On that assumption how about the following:
Design the first page after they have logged in to be the summary view of open and/or past tickets. But - the first time they log in or if there are no tickets have the ...
3
There is absolutely no difference in usability testing an intranet site from a public web site. The questions are the same and the conventions are exactly the same on public web sites and intranet. The big difference is the target audience, which on an intranet are this group of people, instead of 30 year old males or women wanting to buy red shoes. The ...
2
can I answer my own question?
• Pay special attention to the intranet homepage; it is essential to attracting users and communicating information
• We need to gain a detailed understanding of internal workflows and processes so that we can presenting standard intranet information, including policies, forms, and procedures, much more-so than a standard ...
2
One of the big UX differences is that a public website has to sell the company, because it is the public face of the organisation. This means that it is often bright, loads of images, it is a publicity tool.
And intranet is a tool for employees to use. You are not selling, so you don't need to focus so much on the look and style of the site in corporate ...
2
Back in '97-98 I helped a major management consulting firm launch their first intranet. We did a lot of stuff wrong, but one thing we got right was the company directory. Each employee entry included a picture, phone number, email address, office location and area of expertise. We also allowed employees to edit their own profiles.
Regarding your situation ...
2
I agree that intranet, especially given the vagaries of English and its inevitable confusion with Internet, should be avoided.
The site my former company, a non-profit, used for this purpose (expense claims, logging hours for contractors, communications, etc) was called backoffice.
It's easily-understood by non-techies, you can create a subdomain with that ...
2
There is a violation of consistency I think. There are controls with the same names( e.g. Home) that take users to different places in the ui and outcomes of controls (e.g. Search) are different. I am wondering if just showing one control (e.g < Organization x) to get back to the global app could work in your situation. If you are going to show another ...
2
You don't say what kind of initiative it is, whether an add-on to an existing platform or something entirely new, but you will encounter complexity, so I would recommend a prototyping approach to learn about your users' needs as you progress. Similarly, you can develop your questions at each stage of the process as you learn more and your needs change.
It ...
2
Observing (even a couple of) users or having them walk you through their tasks is really valuable. You seem to be aware of it but it cannot be stressed enough. You wrote that “interviewing the user is hard” but what does hard mean in this context? It still might be worthwhile to push for some access. You will need to talk to real users for the usability ...
1
I am mainly with Juan Lanus on this but, wanted to make some slightly different points/download.
I think one to one interviews are best, and a semi formal interview is the best format. You need to realise you will always have the 'power' and part of your job is to allow the person to have control in the conversation. This is different to many other ...
1
Since I don't have any previous experience with usability surveys of intranet sites I can't provide any specific information on that, however the popular belief is that the design goals should not differ between internal and consumer products when it comes to creating a good UX.
However, to find a variety of questions that you could use for your ...
1
Usually I agree with Benny, but this time I don't. Knowing your users personally makes a fundamental difference. Of course, you have all the tools you have for public websites (logs, etc), and you have to use most of them. But the most important is:
W A T C H Y O U R U S E R S
Watch them while they're working with the system. Watch newbies ...
1
OK, so not strictly related to how to launch an intranet per se, but some of these recommendations will allow smooth transition and rapid uptake of the new intranet, which I think is tangentially relevant, yes?
from How do approaches for UX differ between intranets and normal websites?
there are a number of approaches or UX strategies you could employ, ...
1
At work we have two systems on this topic, which differs from the gamification implementation of SE sites. On our intranet we have a star-system on our knowledge bank. Employees are engouraged to star knowledge elements if thoy found them useful or not. This is an exact copy of App Store, Google Play (formerly known as Android Market) and Windows Phone ...
1
The only issue I can see arising from such a pilot test is that IT staff have a higher tolerance for sub-par UX, which means they'll complain only about overly convoluted elements. Other than that, IT is still part of the company and has the same goals and administrative tasks to accomplish. Therefore, if the IT department finds the intranet easy-to-use the ...
1
A development process focused solely on one set of users, when other users are known, does not tend to be a useful pilot because it is not representative.
It sounds to me as if the question they're asking you is really "Can we knowingly ignore a large portion of users and still get the UX right for everyone, or at least not have to go back and re-think ...
1
The short and catchy titles others have mentioned are good if they are descriptive. Calling something "The Hub" when it isn't ( because most stuff isn't there ) is just confusing and misleading.
I would suggest, similar to some others, giving it a nice clear front page, properly designed, providing a very clear indication of what you can access from it, and ...
1
Simple: make it a product. Give it a specific name. Give it a version number. Keep upping the version number. Do not refer to it in a general sense.
I've had much better success in building products for people when they realize that their site will be a specific product not some general thing. Knowing that that their product will specifically address their ...
1
We had an employee-wide contest to submit names for the intranet. The intranet committee narrowed them down to 5 and then had everyone vote. Most popular one got the win and the submitter of the winner got a prize. We then modified the internal URL to prominently feature the chosen name, branded the landing page accordingly and set everyone's browser ...
1
It's an interesting question.
Pondering it I came up with
Web Office
Online Office
My line of thought is that what the "intranet" in many instances is used for is instant accessibility to factions of the company. You visit the intranet to find news of a company project, instead of walking across the building to ask them. You put in your working hours ...
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