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Redesigning the Intranet
Business
problem
When building a new intranet from scratch, it's impossible to predict
how it will grow and how it will be used. After several years of
rapid growth, it's a good idea to reevaluate the design and make
adjustments as necessary. How does one perform an intranet redesign?
Identifying
a problem
When we first built the intranet, there was very little content
and we were all new to the organization. Lacking any better alternative,
we decided to use basic content categories from another successful
health care intranet built in a prior "work life." This
was OK for a starting point, but as this intranet grew, we began
to worry that we had outgrown the original design.
It
was our sense, from anecdotal feedback and casual observations,
that:
-
the basic design (page layout) was still OK, and
- search
worked well; but
- it
was hard to find items without search.
We
needed proof and some direction.
Why
bother?
Corporate intranets are very expensive in terms of staff time. According
to one influential study
by the Nielson Norman Group, if an organization the size of ours
improves the "usability" of their intranet from "good"
to "best," it will save nearly $5 million annually in
staff time wasted trying to find information. So it is definitely
worth investing some money and effort to make the intranet as efficient
as possible.
Usability
testing
Based on a recommendation from a former colleague, we engaged the
Bentley College Design
and Usability Center to conduct usability testing of our intranet.
The process was very interesting.
The
goals for the study were to:
- Assess
how easy or difficult the site is to navigate
- Determine
whether the information architecture and navigation are intuitive
and efficient to use
In
preparation for the usability testing, our first assignment was
to identify three user "profiles" that best represented
most of our workers. We decided on these:
- Clinical
- Administrative
- Manager
We
selected four participants for each of the three profiles, looking
for a mix of technology literacy and organizational roles within
each profile:
- Clinical:
physician (x2); clinical specialist; psychologist
- Administrative:
ward clerk; admin coordinator; financial analyst; nutritionist
- Manager:
ambulatory; clinical finance; HR; nursing
Finally,
we selected a set of tasks for participants to perform during the
testing, including about a dozen common tasks for everyone and five
different tasks for each role:
- Common
tasks (finding information about people, a specific policy, two
reports, etc.)
- Clinical
(finding a specific form, who is on call for oncology, two lists,
and specific patient education items)
- Manager
(finding supervisory assignments, HR requests, responsible manager
for a department, IT requests, and a specific list)
- Administrative
(finding maintenance requests, HR requests, conference room scheduling,
IT requests, and a specific list)
Over
a period of three days, each participant spent an hour with one
of the Bentley staff, talking about their experiences with and perceptions
of the intranet, and attempting to complete the tasks for their
role. Everything was videotaped with simultaneous screen capture,
allowing the Bentley staff to conduct detailed analysis of exactly
what each person did and said while attempting to complete each
task.
Summary
of findings
The conclusions from the usability study included:
- Overall,
site navigation was easy.
- Of
particular success was the use of search.
- The
most significant problem was the information architecture itself:
e.g., which of the main "tabs" would contain the desired
item. Some tabs contained objects ("Directories," Resources"),
while other tabs were role-related ("Staff," "Managers,"
etc.).
New
information architecture
Now that we had identified the problem, Bentley staff recommended
a "card sort" exercise with users to identify the proper
information architecture and top level "buckets" (tabs).
- Bentley
staff selected 75 terms from across the full range of intranet
content, with a definition for each.
- We
identified thirty more participants, ten from each of the same
three profiles used for usability testing.
- Each
participant was offered a $20 Amazon.com gift certificate upon
completion of the exercise.
- The
exercise was conducted on-line, from anywhere the participant
chose, and required about 30-40 minutes to complete.
- Participants
sorted the 75 terms into groupings that they found logical and
intuitive.
After
analyzing the results of the card sorting exercise, Bentley staff
recommended new groupings of the intranet content. Based on these
recommendations, we selected seven new top-level tabs for intranet
navigation, in descending order of frequency of use:
- Tools
(things used to accomplish a task)
- Staff
(everything related to working here)
- Directories
(lists, charts, team sites, wikis, etc.)
- Reference
(policies, procedures, general reference)
- Clinical
(anything useful for someone working in clinical areas)
- Reports
(reorganized into clearer groupings)
- Academic
(anything related to teaching programs)
We
also reorganized everything within the primary buckets, creating
new categories that were more consistent with the groupings from
the card sorting exercise. Although it was still a lot of work,
our database design (Driving
with Databases) made the reorganization much easier.
Although
we have not yet done another usability test to validate any improvements,
anecdotal feedback indicates that people are more satisfied with
the intranet's navigation and better able to find what they need.
Hopefully the next usability test will confirm that the redesign
moved the intranet from a "good" to "best" design
based on Nielson Norman Group criteria.
Lessons
learned
- Usability
testing is well worth the cost in time and money.
- Investing
in the best possible intranet design is justified by improved
staff productivity.
- Database-driven
intranets make reorganizing content much easier.
Posted 3 April 2008
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