Intranet Blog

In a recent survey conducted with our customers the following intranet applications proved to be the most popular among users.   We share them with you here so that you can check that your intranet is providing your staff with the tools that they want and need.

1. Search

When searching for something on the intranet, people want quick, accurate results.  If intranet search fails to deliver speed and accuracy then people lose confidence in it and usage drops off.

In order to provide user satisfaction intranet search needs to:

• Search all content on the intranet, including staff directory, calendars, and applications and
• Prioritise search results by, for example, popularity, date, ratings, or ‘best bets’.
• Rank search results on criteria such as popularity, date, document or content ratings

Coupled with an effective search engine, your intranet should be able to provide you with search analytics so you can see trends in what people are searching for, what searches are successful, and how many searches were not successful so you can identify missing content?

2. Staff Directory

Connecting people is an important function of a collaborative intranet.  Users expect far more than just an internal phone directory from their staff directories.  

Those that incorporate elements of the popular social networking sites with collaborative tools are the real crowd pleasers which help gain employee buy-in.  The ability for users to create blogs and share what they are working on via status updates transforms the intranet into a truly collaborative platform for better idea sharing and cross company knowledge sharing.

This sense of community is also driven by giving staff the ability to easily find colleagues with particular skills and experience, or location.  A sense of community increases employee satisfaction and encourages knowledge transfer, so it’s no surprise that the staff directory is one of the most popular applications.

3. Forms and Business Processes

Getting business processes online is a great way of keeping users coming back to the intranet.  Whether it be holiday requests or filling out expenses forms, it’s crucial that they are visible, easy to find, and quick and easy to use.

Online forms offer a simple and effective way of adding interactivity to an intranet and our customers tell us that they deliver clear productivity benefits and costs savings through time saved for both staff filling in the forms and administrative time in processing them, not to mention the money saved by eliminating the printing of paper forms.

4. Interact’s ‘My Widget’

Interact’s 'My Widget' feature gives users the ability to select the information they need themselves and therefore increase the relevancy of content.  My Widget enables users to integrate their personal favourites easily into the intranet and provides them with a shortcut to content that is interesting and relevant to them. 

This is particularly successful because it enables users to follow progress on selected content without having to go and actively seek out the information.  It keeps them informed of content they have an interest in by displaying any comments made on their blogs (or blogs they have subscribed to) as well as comments on articles, they have commented on and progress on any documents they have added to their 'favourites'. 

5. Blogs

Intranet blogs are becoming more mainstream and popular amongst our customers.  Blogs are informal, direct and natural and reflect the personality and voice of the person who is blogging - these qualities make blogs a very popular feature.

We are finding that as well as senior executive blogs, where corporate vision can be reinforced and news communicated quickly, blogs also give the power of communication to individuals at much lower ranks within the organisation allowing companies to capitalise on the opportunity to encourage communication and knowledge flow upwards through the organisation.

In order for your intranet to be really user-centric and provide all the key tools that your staff need on a day to day basis, then you should make sure that you have these killer apps on your intranet - they will drive people to your intranet and keep them coming back.

Do you know which keywords / search phrases people are entering and how to choose the most appropriate ones for your intranet content?

Finding this information is easy with Interact’s Statistics & Search Analytics which will give you detailed reports including:

• Failure to find report:  Highlights content deficiencies prompting content managers to add the missing information and can identify differences in terminology used.

• Searches with zero results:  highlights content that is missing, helps in the development of effective navigation and suitable keywords or metadata.

• Documents without keywords:  a list of documents where no keywords have been applied.  Highlights which documents may not be included in search results but may be relevant.
Having this information to hand is one thing; converting it into action that will benefit your intranet search is another. 

Find information black holes on your intranet

I’d like to share with you a couple of ways in which our customers use this information to stress the importance of keywords to content authors and ensure that content is tagged with appropriate keywords.

Helen Haynes, Intranet Manager at The Nottingham Building Society finds Interact’s search reports extremely useful:

“With the stats provided I forward all the details collected to the publishers of those articles. They then see a long excel list of information in their areas which people find hard to find. This is giving people an idea of the words to use when adding articles in the future and also highlights the use of the search facility”

Nicky Robbins at Rooftop Housing Group looks at the ‘failure to find report’ for review at their regular Intranet User Group meetings content authors are then tasked with changing or adding keywords to their content, hence improving search.

How do you use search statistics to ensure that your intranet content is tagged with the right keywords?  Post a comment and let us know.

by Steven Osborne, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

Intranets exist to help people do ‘things’, they are a key business tool assisting people to find information and facilitating the completion of a task. Does your intranet help users to find what they want, or are they left floundering?

An intranet should be structured, and populated with content that can be found. Traditionally Intranets have leant towards a departmental taxonomy; the evolution of Intranets has seen a move towards a task based structure. Users come to an intranet with an “action” the intranet should help them meet their requirements with efficiency and ease.

Intranet users arrive seeking something - the majority of these users will then use a search function as their first step. Making content findable and also allowing users to contribute to improving the structure is a key requirement of an effective intranet

Content Editors can improve findability by tagging content with popular keywords, and keywords that are in a user’s vocabulary. Using a relevant vocabulary can be achieved by encouraging users to suggest keywords to tag content with, so creating a folksonomy that will help content be found

It needn’t be one or the other. A taxonomy and folksonomy can co-exist in order to improve the structure of an intranet over time. An existing taxonomy will have undergone investment and consideration, it gives an ordered structure. Combine this with the benefits of tagging; improved connection between content editors and users, and creating an environment where collaboration is encouraged to deliver a user-friendly system.

by Steven Osborne, Odyssey Interactive Ltd

When designing an Intranet site a key consideration is to bear in mind the people that will share the space and be the users of the Intranet.  If end users are involved in the design process then you are far more likely to end up with a design and structure that users not only like, but one that they know how to use intuitively and therefore will use effectively.

When choosing those to involve it is important to get a representative sample of end users, from across the organisation; teams and functions, as well as from those that will contribute content as well as 'consume' it.  (You should also include those who you might suspect as being Intranet phobes.)

Recently I asked one such group how they would group content that they knew to be on an existing intranet as well as content that they would like to be on new intranet.  This exercise had two benefits.  Firstly it provided useful information with regard to how users would group information and secondly it provided clues to the "missing content" that an end user would expect an intranet to contain.

Studying how users grouped content revealed a high level of consistency in the number of groups and the content of these groups.  How they grouped content then enabled those responsible for the design of the structure to define the global navigation and pleasingly the 'group' names suggested by the user group were adopted as the 'tags' for the global navigation.

This process does take time, but the fact that you are taking time to involve users from the outset means that you save time in the post launch phase as well as reducing possible dissatisfaction and confusion.