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Today is World Usability Day, which was founded by the Usability Professionals’ Association to promote the belief that the services and products important to life should be easier to access and simpler to use. Each year it is held on the second Thursday in November. To read more about it, just go to the site
http://www.worldusabilityday.org/
Usability, in relating to our web products and knowledge processes is something we are passionate about. Unfortunately, time and resource, does not always allow us to go as faras we should. providing we keep it on the agenda I can live with myself. |
Tag: Governance
Thinking of the people
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HR and people related content on intranets generally feature highly in the most popular pages. Our HR pages are no exception, with over 20,000 visits per month to ???people??? related areas. However, over the past 24 months the attention given to maintaining these areas has not reflected this popularity. The area has suffered from old, duplicate and incomplete content. This area is now being addressed. A project, sponsored by our HR department are now looking at ensuring content will be published within a governed, user centric structure. The approach has two stages. First the ???ticking plaster??? ??? urgently addressing the issues with the current site. Stage two sees the complete redevelopment of HR related areas, bringing content under one structure, improved search, enhanced navigation, new taxonomy/tags and a greater focus on how the user engages with the content. Working with the Intranet team the project milestones will include stakeholder workshops, user research, design briefs, user testing and a full adoption programme to ensure a site that is sustainable moving forward. |
Training to engage
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Just read the Guardian article about the digital divide (actually brought the paper rather than read it online –
For me, the same applies within the workplace. We all talk about engagement and collaboration (well I always do) but we provide little to none training in collaboration or how to use the tools to collaborate.
No-where is there budget or resource to include all our staff within the digital framework. In my disucssion with various online stakeholders many agree that its the basis digital skills that are a hurdle to collaboration within the organisation, and greater resource on training or inclusion in this area will reap greater rewards. Problem is, as the article mentions, is that no resource of funds are available to provide this. No department has the remit, nor I suspect the desire, to deal with the issue. Why don’t I do it? You’re right (now I’ll talking to myself) – its something on the list and one day I’ll get a sponsor. Maybe not today but one day.
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Communities – the soul of our intranet
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Our intranet is focused around the services we offer our clients. Each service has a community presence on the intranet – some thriving, some not – allowing document management, communications and aspects of collaboration. Most of our musings on to intranet stakeholders focus about communities. We have a belief that people share knowledge to a far greater extent within communities – groups they know, understand, relate and engage with (rather than capture/management systems that failed in the late 90s), hence much of our work is about building online communities as the foundations of knowledge sharing. My background was in psychology and organisational development so I use work such as McMillan & Chavis (1986) with a hint of psyco babble to form a strategy for community building. We generally take the following 5 step approach when looking at building the community: 1 – Sponsorship. Ensure you have the right level of sponsorship that has the mussel and weight within the community and the organisation 2 – Governance. Ensure there is a strategy, process for escalation, management structure, workflow, risk assessment and a good business case before any build takes place 3 – Content. Look at the content available or required to be created 4 – Technology. Source the correct technology for the content requirements 5 – Training – provide publishers the tools and knowledge to sustain their community 6 – Adoption – once built and launched work with the community to ensure the sustainability of the site Within these processes come tasks such as stakeholder collaboration, user surveys, design briefs, user testing etc. One of the benefits of building a virtual presence is that the aspects of sharing knowledge in the physical space becomes more realistic to users within the community. |
Back to basics
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Just read the IBF e-newsletter regarding the hottest topics in the intranet world. Usability, maturity and ‘inside out’ all hit the right note, however, for me I think the last few months internally have been ‘going back to basics’ (d’oh! how I dislike sounding like ex-Prime Minsters) but its been a case of working with our communities to iron out issues such as good navigation, search, and listening to the user to enhance the user experience. I guess these traits will never change on the operational side of an intranet. I think from day one of my browser career the internal online offering was always about good search and a decent employee directory. 12 years on I’m not sure much has changed for the vast majority of users. |
The value is in the playground
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I always use analogies to simplified and understand the world of online. Its helps me make sense of things. At my job interview back in 2000 I used analogies for cooking and football to explain my methods.
When I first started developing websites I used the analogy of a supermarket, linking comparisons with usability, unique visitors, length of visits etc – you should have heard it, a master class if I say so myself.
The intranet world has moved on and my analogy now for intranets is a school. At a school we have formal classes, play time, assembly, registration and after school activities. The structure of an intranet is the same. We have formal document areas (class time); assembly (internal communications); registration (all the HR elements within the site); and communities (the various after school activities). Play time is where we introduce the collaborative elements of an intranet. It’s unstructured but it’s where the intranet can provide most value. Looking at our role within intranets we could see ourselves as playground assistant – monitoring what occurs in the playground, ensuring nothing dangerous is happening, and then learning, reporting and structuring around what we learn from these social collaborative gathering. By the way the intranet canteen menu is dinner time.
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You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You.
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Just finishing off an article for our monthly intranet newsletter. Its part of our adoption approach to ensure we have an active, engaged group of intranet stakeholders – those that run and drive the strategy and activity within our knowledge communities on our intranet. Apart from the monthly e-newsletter we also produce a blog, a feature area on our intranet and, where resource permits both physical and virtual meetings with key stakeholders. Our strategy is to inform, guide and motivate through a mixture of internal news, technical updates and an drop of external best practice. Like most organisations we have a mixture of eager participants and those that go through the motion. We produce a ‘recommended’ profile of someone who would make a good stakeholder to lead an online community area. In some cases this is considered, in many cases ignored. So goes the fate of an online community. But as they say in Texas..You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You. |
Troops on the ground with passion
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On 1st October my firm completed a rebranding programme. The visible effects on the intranet were colour scheme and the switch from illustrations to photo imagery. A number of weeks prior to the switch we looked at the most efficient way this could be done. Schemes were devised and then dropped (i.e. an agent to find/replace jpegs, gifs etc – not all image files could be dropped such as photos of events and individuals). Eventually we fell back on the fail-safe position of manual updates. Leading up to the brand change we spent many nights removing illustrations. On the night of the rebrand we then loaded photos to a number of key pages. We’ve learnt some lessons, particularly becoming stricter on who, how and where photos can be used. A number of intranet stakeholders worked with great passion to ensure their areas complied to the new branding.
It did get me thinking, even after all these years of improved content management systems, some tasks still need the troops on the ground deleting, copying, replacing and uploading. Just confirms to me that one of the main mantras for running an intranet is that its ‘run by people, for people, who need connecting to people’. Technology is useful but passion is key |
Back to the survey
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Been spending the morning putting together an annual survey (using Surveymonley) for one of our top community sites. It’s nearly one year old and usage has been far greater than anticipated. When a community launches we work on adoption programme with the relevant community to ensure we avoid the ‘launch and leave’ approach that are so common. Good sponsorship, governance and adoption ensures sustainable sites. Generally we produce, in collaboration with the community, a survey 3 months after launch, followed up by yearly surveys (would recommend every 6 months by we don’t have the resource for this). Also find some face-to-face and telephone interviews ensure we have a good idea of how the site is meeting the community needs. All the material, although prepared by the intranet team, is sent by the community stakeholders to ensure maximum participation. Generally we get between 35%-45% of the community responding which I believe is fairly high. We target the whole community and individual groups (through key influencers) to ensure high response rates. |
Its all about people
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It’s almost a year since we started an intrenal blog about the work of our team. When we first did it was a way of sharing with a wider audience the discussions and thoughts we have internally, in our team meetings and across the intranet community. Although I write most of the posts, they actually reflect the discussions, ideas and thoughts that we have had right across the Intranet community. Sharing our thoughts on social media, online communities, content, training, intranets and everything related to it. If you’re new to our blog (or have just been a long-time reader) I thought it would be interesting to reflect on what’s been, and after the proliferation of word-clouds for Obama’s Inauguration Speech, I created the same for the Intranet blog. Four words were prominent: people social communities governance. We write about online communities and how they behave. We write social media and its potential in knowledge sharing. We write about the protocols that govern the behaviour. That’s what we know and what we do. But in doing so it’s important to remember that what we’re really writing about is people and how they interact in a social environment. It’s why we think that we need to focus on how we build and manage online communities. In a good online community, the technology should be invisible, it’s about the people and the way we work together in a social environment than makes the difference.
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Mark Tilbury - digital workplace specialist 