Alternative Ways to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Intranet Sites

When you measure hits on inter/intranet sites, you are measuring overall volume of usage -- how many times parts of your site have been opened. However, hits don't distinguish between the opening of an entire page or a single illustration. There are many additional ways of measuring usage. However, measuring the "userability" of a site is just as important in order to improve usage numbers. But the first place any communicator should start when measuring the effectiveness of electronic communications is to identify the original objectives for putting something on-line. Conducting some baseline audience research upfront to make sure your electronic solutions will be as effective as possible and then measuring afterward to see if the intended objectives are being met.

Sinickas, Angela D. Sinickas Communications (2000). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Log Analysis

Anatomy of a Corporate Intranet Project  

Today more and more companies use intranets to communicate with employees and to help them perform their jobs. An intranet is an internal network that operates like the Internet.

Rhines, Becky. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Applying Brand To An Intranet

Brand has become an integral part of the employee communicator's role as organizations recognize the importance of employee behaviors in building brand. When it comes time to integrate brand elements into the intranet or portal, good usability practices and testing can guide that integration, ensuring desired employee behaviors.

Wilson, Stacy and Susan Weinschenk. Communication World Bulletin (2003). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Caught in the Web: An Intranet Adventure  

As the World Wide Web rapidly evolves, as philosophies for designing online documents change, and as technologies grow ever more sophisticated the technical communicator is presented with many challenges. What are the most eflective methods for structuring, authoring and maintaining online documents? What are the best tools and formats to use for the construction of a documentation Web site? What kinds of technical decisions must the designer or writer make? HTML or PDF? GIF or JPEG? Can several text and graphics formats be combined into one seamless site? What about hypertext links - how many is too many? What is the best approach to building a prototype? Presenting it to users? Selling it to management? Many lessons can be learned before embarking on the journey. , .

Cluff, Susan C. STC Proceedings (1997). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Designing a Different Kind of Intranet: An Intranet for a UX Team

Most of us who are working as part of a design team in a services company, a product company, or even a design boutique have to live with a generic intranet. In this article, I’ll describe how to leverage your company’s intranet and how to build a community around an intranet for a UX team.

Mallik, Anirban Basu. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Web Design>Community Building>Intranets

Developing Intranets Which People Use: Making Progress When Everyone has an Opinion

The goal of an intranet site is to improve knowledge sharing and productivity. In a large company, it can be difficult to achieve consensus on how to make this happen. Knowledge management experts, information systems project managers, graphic designers, marketing leaders, HTML developers and usability engineers are used to fighting for their places, convinced that they know best. In truth, the intranet is not yet mature, and there are no definite answers. This chapter describes experiences with the intranet sites of two Fortune 500 companies. In both cases, the usability engineer was a consultant from outside the company, in one case part of a team of consultants and in the other working more closely with company employees. Both intranet projects were riddled with mishaps, bad decisions, personality conflicts, and compromises. Still, the usability engineers were able to improve the sites by becoming members of the project teams, and by tirelessly incorporating usability in everything they did.

Zukor, Lee. ACM (2001). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Usability

The Flexible Intranet    

The key to efficient and effective user support is an intranet site that supports employees in performing their tasks. However, most intranet sites offer an overload of information that users often must interpret on their own. Van Mansom outlines a useful approach to creating corporate intranet sites.

van Mansom, Kees. Intercom (2008). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Good to Great Intranets

QAS is a small company with only 400 employees. However, this small postal software company well understands the power and value of knowledge and empowering employees with the right information and tools to excel in their day-to-day jobs. How? Rather than accepting their small size and stature as an impediment to intranet success, QAS has evolved their intranet from good to great.

Ward, Toby. Communication World Bulletin (2007). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

The Intranet as a News Channel

While the use of a news section on the company intranet's home page is widespread, communicators need to ask themselves how effective this is as a way to avoid mixed messages and information overload. Does it reduce information overload, or increase it? And how can the news section be used to effectively cut through informational clutter?

Robertson, James. Communication World Bulletin (2005). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Newsletters

An Intranet Story

An intranet, in contrast to the Internet, is in-house and serves the employees of an enterprise. Although intranet pages may link to the Internet, an intranet is not accessed by the public. The intranet was fertile ground for web-savvy geeks like me to till and plant.

Findlay, Hugh. Carolina Communique (2006). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Intranet: Another Word for EPSS?  

Easy access to corporate databases, collaboration areas and tools for project teams, up-to-date product and competitive information, instant access to information on employee benefits and company policies, a single email system that reaches every desktop and every person. These are some of the services that are causing companies across the world to implement Internet standards, protocols, and browsers within their organizations. This introductory session demonstrates the progression of intranets from glorified networks to electronic performance support systems and gives you the opportunity to determine how an intranet might benefit your company while designing several intranet approaches.

Hyman, Francine N. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>EPSS

Pandora's Portal

Is the portal a task-oriented platform for applications, e-services and cross-functional business process integration or a tool for enterprise-wide knowledge management? Is it a bottom-up enabler of communication and collaboration or a top-down channel for broadcasting official corporate propaganda? Inevitable consensus answer? It's all of these things and more, and the IT folks better be ready to support this exciting new paradigm!

Morville, Peter. Semantic Studios (2001). Articles>Knowledge Management>Intranets>Web Design

Productivity in the Service Economy

Yes, it is possible for white-collar workers to work smarter and become more productive. While intranet usability provides substantial initial gains, workflow usability can go much further and will save millions of jobs.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2004). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Workflow

Promises of a Global Intranet

Did you know an intranet could actually be more global than the Internet? The interactions within an intranet are more intense and frequent, and anonymity is replaced with specificity—your real name, job title and location. Company management often believes that a unified employee communication intranet site will foster a community, a shared corporate culture and a universal standard. But a review of two U.S.-based global intranets reveals that today’s reality may fall short.

Lopez, Joselito T. Communication World Bulletin (2004). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>International

Seven Steps to Employee Portal Nirvana (Or at Least a Portal That Really Works)

Confusing. Frustrating. Underutilized. Time-consuming. If you are like most communicators, these are just some of the words that come to mind when thinking about your organization’s employee portal. Intranets and employee portals have long been plagued by numerous challenges, including limited funding, poor navigation, content overload and changing technology. Add in growing user expectations, disengaged executives and differing opinions about what portals are and how they deliver tangible value, and it’s no wonder they are such sore spots for communicators.

Rudnick, Michael. Communication World Bulletin (2004). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Business Communication

Intranet Information Architecture (IA)

In analyzing 56 intranets, we found many common top-level categories, labels, and navigation designs, but ultimately, the diversity was too great to recommend a single IA.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2007). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>Intranets

Structuring Job Related Information on the Intranet: An Experimental Comparison of Task vs. an Organization-based Approach    

In this article, we present a usability experiment in which participants were asked to make intensive use of information on an intranet in order to execute job-related tasks. Participants had to work with one of two versions of an intranet: one with an organization-based hyperlink structure, and one with a task-based hyperlink structure. Efficiency and effectiveness were measured in terms of execution time and task accuracy, respectively. After the task execution, participants were asked to evaluate the task as well as the intranet. The results show that participants perform more efficiently with the organization-based structure, which is probably due to their familiarity with this structure. A post hoc analysis revealed, however, a learning effect in the task condition, which suggests that once users are acquainted with it, a task structure is at least as efficient.

Cozijn, Reinier, Alfons Maes, Didie Schackman and Nicole Ummelen. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2007). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Usability

Taming a Chaotic Intranet

Admit it. Your intranet is a mess. What started out as a great idea for sharing information inside the company has turned into the corporate junk drawer—a jumbled collection of useful, not-so-useful, relevant, irrelevant, redundant, inconsistent and unmanaged stuff. While parts of it make you proud (perhaps the employee directory or news portal), taken as a whole, it just hasn’t lived up to all the grand ideas you had when you posted those first few pages.

Stevenson, Jerry. Communication World Bulletin (2004). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Information Design

Targeted Investment: The Key to Employee Portal Improvement

In many organizations, when economic conditions improve, funding becomes available for investment in internal communication technologies. While the potential expansion of budgets is welcome news to communicators around the globe, capitalizing on it requires careful, thoughtful prioritization of still-precious resources. So what type of focused investments should communicators consider? Intranet and employee portal improvements should be high on the list.

Rudnick, Michael. Communication World Bulletin (2004). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

A Technical Communicator’s Role in Planning, Developing, and Maintaining a Corporate Intranet Site

Technical communicators can gain knowledge and expertise in web technology including developing intranet sites, usability engineering, and knowledge management.

Kays, Tami. Orange Journal, The (2004). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Top Ten Tips to Improve Your Intranet Site

Is your intranet failing to deliver value for your company and your staff? If so, time and money are being wasted. Research shows that employees can take twice as long to complete tasks and get information from a poor intranet as compared to one that is well designed. This wasted time can cost over US$1,000 each year, per employee, which translates to a cost of US$1 million for every 1,000 employees. So what can you do to improve your intranet? Here are 10 things to think about.

Gupta, Anu. Communication World Bulletin (2004). Articles>Web Design>Intranets

Training Your Intranet's End-Users and Content-Providers  

A technical writer on an intranet team can also play the role of trainer. This paper provides a 'how to' of training end-users and content-providers associated with a web- and PDF-based company intranet. These ideas will be expanded in the session and on the CD-ROM of the Proceedings.

Funkhouser, LaVonna F. STC Proceedings (1997). Articles>Education>Intranets>Web Design

Truly Love Your Intranet? Set it Free

If the pace of change in social media and collaborative working continues, intranets as we know them will rapidly become a thing of the past. At the same time, those responsible for corporate intranets need to be sure that past and present investment in the platform pays off. What should they do?

Keohane, Kevin and Mike Williams. Communication World Bulletin (2007). Articles>Web Design>Intranets