Content Formula
LS_NewsFeed_Free-1-1.png
Get your FREE News feed web part today!
Learn more
Download now
Get in touch

AIA insurance saves money and time with Yammer

Posted on by Hannah Barltrop

How to measure Yammer ROI – AIA Insurance from Business Goes Social

Too many people still think ‘social’ means chatting, when in fact social communication simply means talking with colleagues across the organisation in order to get things done.

The technology used to support social networking and collaboration is important insofar as you want your internal social network to be easy to use, but it’s the use that you put it to that’s vital.

At AIA (very large life insurance company across Asia-Pacific region) they found that help desk requests were flooding in at an unmanageable rate. This meant that actuaries were delayed in doing their actuarial work. But you know how people are; if we can ask a colleague and get instant help, we can get more done, faster.

But when someone becomes known for being helpful, they can spend their time replying to the same sort of ‘help’ emails day after day. There’s a better way, and Virpi Oinonen has sketched the journey that AIA, under Bob Crozier, took to create a community of users – sharing the load and helping each other. Take a look at the presentation.

The lesson is that a focused purpose for your community or enterprise social network is the key to driving adoption and getting a return on your investment. If we can help you integrate Yammer into your intranet, and daily practices, drop us a mail. Take a look at our Yammer and SharePoint work for Johnson Matthey.

A 7-point framework for employee engagement in the digital workplace

Modern organisations are using a number of clever techniques to accelerate internal change and make it stick. This free e-book puts forward a simple and effective 7-point framework to use to deliver change campaigns and programmes.




 

Is my data safe on SharePoint Online and Office 365?

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

There are plenty of reasons why organisations want to migrate their SharePoint intranet, Exchange, and other digital workplace tools to the cloud. But some people still view the move to the cloud as a big risk. Working at Content Formula, I find risk is the most common objection we come across from our clients when considering Office 365.

This is entirely rational. If you are responsible for your companys data and systems its your job to think about this and ask — wheres my data going to sit? How secure is it? What about compliance? Reliability?

Cloud securitySecurity

This infographic of the worlds biggest data breaches will send shivers down the spine of any CIO. It also illustrates the different ways that data can fall into the wrong hands. This means that any security measures need to be multi-layered. Office 365 security is made up of the following layers: physical security, logical security, data security, user controls and admin controls.

Physical security is all about ensuring the data centres themselves are safe and secure from threats such as intruders but also from ‘inside jobs’. Microsoft goes way beyond security guards and CCTV. They have biometrics palm readers, segregation of the data network from the external network, demagnetisation and destruction of faulty hard drives, and role separation of datacenter staff to name a few.

Logical security covers computer systems and the processes for managing them and keeping them secure. Microsoft has two teams in place called Red Team and Blue Team who try to uncover security holes in the Office 365 architecture. The red team attempts to penetrate the systems whilst the blue team attempts to detect and stop them. On top of this, Microsoft also hires independent auditors and penetration testing firms to make sure their systems are bullet-proof. Logical security doesnt just protect from external hackers but also from internal Microsoft access.

The data security layer ensures that data is adequately encrypted both when it is at rest – sitting in a data centre – and when it is in transit across the internet. This means that the only time it is not scrambled is when you are viewing it on your PC. On top of this there are all sorts of anti-spam, monitoring, and malware tools to make sure your data and staff are not falling prey to data thieves.

Giving customers and end users controls so that they can set their own security is a key concept in Office 365 security.

Data Loss Prevention, for example, allows you to restrict where content can be saved and shared, such as a USB stick, OneDrive, or SharePoint. Office 365 also enables end-users to send an encrypted message (even outside their own company) if they feel email is not secure enough.

Mobile Device Management allows IT admins to control how data is accessed on mobile devices and even wipe a device that has been lost or stolen. There are a bunch of other enterprise-level user controls on Office 365.

Data access and privacy

Entrusting a third party to hold and manage your data invariably means that you are giving them access to it. Or does it? Microsoft stresses that it doesnt mine data for advertising purposes but has further recognised customer concern around this and has found many ways to secure customer data from itself as much as possible. Further, Microsoft aims for transparency, disclosing all sorts of details around data location and data access.

The only times Microsoft will access your data is to fix service issues. Even in these instances, there are many restrictions. For instance, only specifically trained, authorised, and authenticated engineers access the data and this is always logged by the system and made available to the customer.

Where possible, only non-content such as IP address, email addresses, subject lines etc. are accessed to resolve issues. If an issue requires content access (as opposed to non-content) this is escalated first and further controls are invoked. There is now an optional yet built-in alert and permission system called Lockbox so that customers can explicitly bar access to data from authorised engineers.

In light of the Edward Snowden NSA revelations, Microsoft also is at pains to stress how seriously it controls customer data access by government agencies. It publishes details of law enforcement requests and fights requests in court if it believes them to be unjustified.

Compliance

Microsoft has racked up an impressive list of certifications and standards when it comes to compliance around data protection. These include international, regional, and industry-specific standards. They are independently verified and audited on a continuous basis. In some cases, Microsoft works directly with data protection bodies to develop their services. In 2014, Microsoft received a letter of endorsement for Office 365 from a group consisting of all the data protection agencies in the European Union. Through the ‘EU Model Clauses’, Office 365 customers can now comply with the EUs stringent Data Protection Directive relating to cross-border transfers of personal data.

To help customers meet specific compliance requirements for their industries, and to enable demonstrable control to auditors and regulators, a whole slew of customer controls are in place. For example, customers can access the Office 365 service logs so that they can show how data has been processed and managed. eDiscovery tools allow customers to mine and analyse vast amounts of data for litigation and investigation purposes. Many other controls allow clients to customise for compliance purposes.

Reliability

These days its fair to say that file management and email are mission critical. Service reliability is therefore a key risk when moving to the cloud. Again, Microsoft sees transparency as a key means of addressing doubts about reliability. It publishes uptime reports that show that the Office 365 service has never dropped below its 99.9% uptime guarantee, at least on a global level.

As a customer, you also have access to an Office 365 service health dashboard of impressively detailed and granular data and reports surrounding your own service.

O365 Service Health Dashboard

When it comes to my own experience with Office 365, Ive had a few minor glitches but nothing more. Ive worked in large organisations that manage their systems in-house; if you have too I am sure you too have seen these systems go down frequently, often for hours at a time.

And this final point brings me to my conclusion. Because surely any evaluation of a cloud service like Office 365 has to be done in comparison with the in-house alternative delivered using smaller resources, less expertise, and more rudimentary functions. Not moving to the cloud may represent the bigger risk for many organisations.

I hope I’ve provided an overview of how Microsoft addresses key risks; as a Tier 1 Microsoft cloud solution provider, we have the utmost confidence in Microsoft’s cloud security. For more detail go to the Office365 Trust Centre.

As a gold Microsoft Partner, we can help you with every aspect of SharePoint and Office 365. Take a look at our recent work.

Were platinum sponsor of the Intranet Now conference

Posted on by Dan Hawtrey

When Wedge, our blog manager and intranet content strategist, came to me in 2014 and said he was launching a new and independent intranet conference, I knew I could help. But I couldnt have foreseen the momentum he built. From a few tweets, he found sponsors, speakers, and an audience in just weeks.

Intranet NowIt turned out that the UK was ready for a brand new conference. Intranet Now was born.

Nobody really knew what to expect back then, but the day went swimmingly, and everyone got a lot out of it.

Last years event had more time, energy, and money invested into it, and was a very swish affair.

Now, for the third event, Wedge and Brian (business partners) mean to switch things up even more, with over 20 lightning talks and a new format for the afternoon activities. I cant wait to see how it goes, and Im looking forward to the table discussions and workshops in the afternoon.

Supporting Wedge this year was an easy decision the Intranet Now conference is a proven event, that attracts comms and intranet people from across the country. With Content Formula as platinum sponsor, we hope to share a little of what weve learnt about intranets, SharePoint and Office 365. But beyond the technology, its the user research and the way we tackle collaboration problems that were known for, and so I hope the whole audience will enjoy our presentation and get something useful out of it.

Intranet Now is an independent conference, run by Wedge and Brian. Theyre keen to create a dynamic day of learning and conversation, and mean to exclude nobody the ticket prices are very low, and the early-bird tickets (which end this month) are virtually a gift. I suppose weve helped keep those prices so low!

A 7-point framework for employee engagement in the digital workplace

Modern organisations are using a number of clever techniques to accelerate internal change and make it stick. This free e-book puts forward a simple and effective 7-point framework to use to deliver change campaigns and programmes.





Setting the strategy and developing an essential intranet (presentation)

Posted on by Hannah Barltrop

Months of intranet development and rework can save a few intense days of planning.

The video offers a 10-minute synopsis of my recent 45-minute keynote. Turn the sound on or off as you prefer.

Even though youll most likely develop your intranet in an agile and collaborative matter, its common sense to have the overall purpose and objectives mapped out and accepted by your stakeholders and colleagues.

The discovery phase of intranet development / improvement is an exciting phase in my mind; you get to uncover business problems and understand the value that a future solution might bring. In parallel, its also a good time to draft several light documents to guide the intranets direction.

Vision

Not everyone is thrilled by the word vision, but having a few short paragraphs to discuss with people inside and outside the project helps everyone gain a similar understanding of what can be intangible work. Think elevator pitch the paragraph that explains what people will be able to do and why thats so important.

My repeated advice is to publish all the supporting material as simple intranet pages and frequently update people with news stories and blog articles about progress.

Strategy

The intranet strategy must support the business strategy or else what is your intranet for?

I asked the conference audience how many had an intranet strategy and a few hands went up. I asked if they had published and updated it most hands went down. Considering the stakeholders and all the content owners and contributors, shouldnt your intranet strategy be easy to access and easy to read?

Strategy isnt about the features or the technology, but about the direction and purpose.
Its about what we will achieve.

Roadmap

Now we get into what many people are rather interested in. The roadmap does layout new functionality and technologies. It shows what youre going to do and when. I am assuming that you believe in continuous improvement, rather than a launch and let go approach to intranet management.

If Microsoft can publish their Office 365 roadmap, you can certainly list out or visually present the improvements you have planned for the next couple of years. This may be as simple as switching on Yammer and helping the Customer Service team better collaborate with the Sales Team.

A 7-point framework for employee engagement in the digital workplace

Modern organisations are using a number of clever techniques to accelerate internal change and make it stick. This free e-book puts forward a simple and effective 7-point framework to use to deliver change campaigns and programmes.




 

Purposes

Knowledge management? Knowledge sharing!Getting things done is the overall purpose of the digital workplace Ill let you define what work means when it comes to collaboration and your business. Its often been said that the intranet supports four purposes:

  • Knowledge management / document management libraries
  • Communication
  • Business processes / tools / activity
  • Collaboration – spaces and tools.

Information is for action, not storage. We musg enable better decision making.As much as document management can be crucial, lets just state for the record that its the application of knowledge that creates value.

How to deliver essential tools

The conclusion of my presentation states that only through research and continuous improvements can you deliver a truly essential intranet.

Content Formula has a visual approach to research. Many people claim to be visual thinkers and dont enjoy reading pages of research results or crunching the numbers involved with data analysis. Lots of stakeholders and clients actually ask to see designs before weve designed anything. Sounds daft, doesnt it? But it’s not.

WireframesAfter a little conversational research, our visual designers (Im thinking about John Scott here) can whip up custom intranet mock-ups to help project managers talk to stakeholders about the end result. These beautiful concept designs help gain buy-in from management and staff alike.

Then its on to user research and UX testing. After a variety of research methods, were able to start laying out content and functionality. We use wireframing to show page layouts, and we can transform these into online prototypes so that people can actually explore. We specifically use prototypes to test the UX by asking people to complete certain tasks like find a certain policy. By watching and measuring how people use the prototype, we can improve our architecture and designs.

Useful, useable, usedBecause our aim is to create an intranet that meets peoples expectations and solves business problems.

Take a look at our series of short articles about SharePoint intranet design, especially the one where John explains prototype testing in detail.

The importance of good graphic design – Planning your new intranet

Posted on by John Scott

In our sixth video, John explains four reaons why visual design is so important to intranet success and employee engagement (and trust). Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more.

John Scott, UX Director
+ 44 20 7471 8500 | jscott@contentformula.com | LinkedIn

Boursin home page v2There are some successful intranets out there that are not particularly attractive, but they work, they do the job, they are fit for purpose. There are other intranets which are very pretty, but they’re not successful, they don’t achieve their objectives.

So does this mean that graphic design isn’t important on intranets? Actually we really think it is important, and sometimes it can even be a deciding factor.

Why is graphic design an important part of an intranet? There are four reasons:

1) Corporate identity – Even though the intranet is internal facing it should still feel part of the brand to employees. The company should be emitting its corporate values both internally and externally, otherwise the employees won’t identify with them.

2) Trust – When employees use the intranet, and the first thing they see is good design, then they are more likely to assume that other aspects of the intranet will meet the same standards. If however they see poor design, then they are more than likely to assume that the content, the functionality, and the usability of the intranet will be equally poor.

3) Clarity of message – Decorative but purposeless design can distract people from the message that’s being communicated. Instead there should be an emphasis on design that aids the communication of the core message. Design can be used to promote the importance of certain content but also to downplay others.

4) Usability – Just as unnecessary design can add noise to the communication, it can also adversely affect the usability of an intranet. As an example, using large scale graphics can dramatically increase page load times, this is a massive factor for usability on mobile devices. Often the quest for making things unique or different can also cause us to break usability conventions.

Jagua Land Rover mobile devicesThe graphic design is always a factor, even on the most functional of intranets. However, depending on the audience and the objectives of an intranet, it can be a decisive factor in its success.

But take a look at our recent designs to see the results we create for clients.

View Joe’s video: Out-of-the-box SharePoint and customisation.
View John’s previous video: prototype testing.
Browse all ‘intranet planning’ videos.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Intranet metrics and KPIs only measure what you mean to act upon

Posted on by Hannah Barltrop

Volt meterStatistics can help you understand how people use your intranet, and whether you manage a massive SharePoint solution or a smaller intranet CMS, you will want to measure the right things so that you can optimise the intranet experience. Here are six major measurements to track and ten further ideas.

What to measure on your intranet

Tasks / workflows completed

Your intranet should help people get things done. Monitoring task initiation vs task completion could help you find a bad process that needs streamlining. Monitoring your workflows will show what people actually do through the year. SharePoint offers powerful workflows, but all modern intranet platforms should support business processes. If youre savvy, youll tie tasks to business outcomes, and then report the figures and the business impact. Self-service saves time and money.

Profiles

Can you monitor how many profiles are 75%+ complete? (Think, LinkedIn.) Can you count how many have decent profile pictures? In a pinch, this can be a dirty indicator of intranet engagement. People who avoid making their profile their own may be disengaged, or not realise what the intranet / ESN is capable of (e.g. the benefits of networking and skill discovery).

Goals

A website with a million visitors can still fail if those visitors dont do what the stakeholders need and expect. Eyeballs do not auto-transform into custom, as we learnt in the 90s. Your intranet must support the aims of your organisation, and should support workflows / processes, knowledge management, collaboration, communication, and community. Set goals for all the things you need employees to do, and monitor the stats so you can optimise the navigation routes, workflows, instructions, and experience. A goal could be spent 90 seconds on our How to Book Travel page. This is a specific goal because its not a mere visit when a person doesnt read the page, and because learning how to book travel should reduce the number of calls to the HR helpdesk / Office Manager. A higher value goal might be creation of / online request for new team site / project site.

Contributors

Track how many different people have contributed to the intranet this month. If your governance is very centralised and strict you might only have a dozen approved content contributors, so youre using your intranet as an old-fashioned broadcast tool. If you have modern governance or a social intranet, tracking how many different people contribute will indicate whether people see the intranet as an easy platform, or whether they prefer emailing documents to each other and using network drives instead of team sites. Those who contribute always value the intranet higher than those who only consume.

Contributions

Track the number of contributions / updates to the intranet. Beware of document dumping when a project manager decides to move hundreds of files from the network drive to the intranet, or when HR update a hundred policies with new branding. Try to look at intranet pages which are the backbone of any web (nobody wishes Wikipedia was made up of PDFs).

Page views

Youll know by now that simply counting total page views tells you nothing about the quality of the intranet. Even reporting on one specific page (todays news, the H&S landing page, the CEOs blog) doesnt quite indicate if the page was relevant, useful, or valued. But low hits might be a cause for concern, so its not like anyone is going to disregard views entirely. Fewer page views (over a section, or the whole intranet) might indicate successful information finding, but then again Andrew Wright uses page views and time spent on the intranet as a correlate for success. Its a debate worth having within your team.

Try to segment intranet usage / page views by department / office / location / hierarchy. Is there a reason why IT doesnt use the intranet at all? (Answer: yes, they use their own private SharePoint installation.) Find team sites / offices (etc.) that are very active on the intranet and find out what drives their success  share their story and best practices. Find team sites / departments that havent adopted the intranet and see what support they need (probably training).

More intranet stats

  • References / citations / back-links of important content. Content fulfils a need if people use it.
  • Shares. Do people help colleagues find the good stuff through integrated social features or an ESN (Enterprise Social Network) layer?systems.
  • Comments, feedback, and ratings. Comments and feedback can be qualitatively very valuable. There are problems with star rating
  • Unique log-ins per day. Segment by department, location etc.
  • Peak times for use. If people log on at 9am but your comms was published at 9:30 then youre missing the boat.
  • Speed of intranet. Work with IT to monitor loading times and performance.
  • Mobile log-ins. Do you allow some kind of access on supplied or personal mobile devices? What do mobile users want in comparison to desktop users?
  • Search terms. Are people searching? Are they finding?
  • Discussion forums. Are they used, or poorly set-up graveyards?
  • Reduction of email or smaller shared drive storage. Ask IT to get involved with driving duplication and costs down.

The word intranet is a big word, and it shouldnt only refer to your intranet platform / CMS. Keep in mind the separate but integrated systems, like the enterprise social network, that makes up ‘the intranet experience’. People dont care if the room booking system is a separate application if its in the browser then its part of the intranet landscape. Decide what KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to highlight to stakeholders, so that they judge the right things. Dont simply hand over scores of stats and graphs, use KPIs to help less-interested people understand whats going on. (Review your KPI usefulness every six months.)

Monitoring the stats will help you come to an understanding of how people currently use the intranet, but only if you can interpret the numbers with appropriate context. Dire numbers may help you work out what needs improving, but big numbers dont always indicate success. Tracking stats, and your hand-picked performance indictors, will help you prove the worth of your intranet to stakeholders helping you develop an intranet that is a true business tool.

Before assuming that obvious stats and the measures SharePoint or your tracking tool provides are good enough, remember the Intranetizen so what? test:

They say, Look! Employees love my content, look at the page views per visit. Translation: Employees clearly cant find what they want.

Dont monitor your intranet to death overly-honed systems can exclude fuzzy humans. Theres room for fun, community, and social chatter (to support your culture). If your intranet itself doesnt supply the stats you need for KPIs, see all the available monitoring tools. Check with your legal team before installing Google Analytics on your intranet.

A version of this article was first published over at Intranetizen.

Yammer and gamification

Posted on by Hannah Barltrop

Notes from our webinar, led by guest expert, Scott Ward. Play the video to watch or listen to the conversation.

Gamification products / services: Badgeville; RedCritter; Big Door; Bunchball. But theres a lot you can do with just Yammer.

Were talking about behaviour here, but Scott says that Gamification is really about data, and storytelling with data.

The gamification products you can buy and use can be quite expensive, it can be more practical to build your own gamification elements.

ROI can be in the millions when you decrease collaboration costs and communication delays, and increase sales.

Gamification incentives:

    • Status awards and visibility
    • Access to senior management or other perks
    • Power enable autonomy
    • Stuff prizes.

Weather map dashboard

Scott has used a stock market report to show which departments and teams are making the best use of the tools. Weve used a weather analogy to display stats encouraging people to reduce rain clouds and increase the sunshine. Visual representation is clear and fun.

Scotts used animated green and red fish on digital displays around the organisation. Staff knew that they wanted to see more green fish while visitors dont know what the digital fish indicated!

Theres always a sense of pride around the number of followers you have.

Quests are a good way to encourage behaviour.

One idea convert praise into beans that you can use with the coffee shop downstairs for coffee.

Green fish indicate 'on target'For an external example of leader boards, take a look at rise.global now.

(The conversation gets derailed as we discuss Nerf guns and the foam ammo.)

Weve found that leaders can get really enthusiastic about the stats and leader boards. Theyve driven engagement.

Further, weve found that key motivators are status and praise. Specifically, weve asked employees to nominate colleagues who have done something brilliant that exemplifies the company values. The kudos of making the nomination, and receiving nominations, was highly valued.

Different people, different cultures, like different incentives. Designers like badges, while IT people like levels levelling up the leader board.

But all this is just to express the user-journey the work and mastery of the employee.

Badgeville's motivation modelSee Badgevilles motivation model (blue and green boxes).

But you should also consider Daniel Pinks motivation theory (autonomy, mastery, purpose).

When to use extrinsic motivation and real incentives? When the process youre rewarding is dull or unpopular. But youll need to improve the reward over time, as prize value erodes for these unpopular tasks.

To disincentives behaviour, take away their SAPS reduce their status, take away their red-carpet access, disempower them, and take away their stuff. The carrot and stick debate rages on   disincentivising is a contentious matter, and may come across as punishment rather than discipline.

(Imagine the serious side compliance matters. Disincentivising dangerous or financially risky behaviour may well be appropriate.)

People learn how to game the game. So you have to find the goal that cant be gamed.

A 7-point framework for employee engagement in the digital workplace

Modern organisations are using a number of clever techniques to accelerate internal change and make it stick. This free e-book puts forward a simple and effective 7-point framework to use to deliver change campaigns and programmes.




Scott says he’s had complaints from people about the gamification criteria, and sometimes the complaints have been valid, and things have needed to be tweaked, but often the complaints come from people who need to improve their behaviour if theyre to match company standards.
I am Ethicon awards

[Read more about our ‘I am Ethicon’ awards and gamification.]

You must take a look at BJ Foggs models he says you need a motivator, the ability to act, and a trigger to start you off. If youre gamification can provide the motivators and triggers, then all you need to ensure is that people have the access, skills, training, and general ability to perform.

Trigger? Think notifications, alerts, and internal communications. A trigger might only encourage a small behaviour further triggers are needed to continue the journey towards the strategic goal.

Scott Ward: Building competitions

Id like to ask you how people might feel if they are a bit late to the party and cant catch up to those employees high up on the leader boards or those who have thousands of followers and get loads of praise. How can we best manage the risk of disengaging people who dont prioritise following quests? What do you think?

Take a look at how we’ve helped clients with Yammer and SharePoint.

Planning your new Intranet – prototype testing

Posted on by John Scott

John talks about the importance of getting end users involved with the design process in our fifth video of our series. A working prototype helps stakeholders and employees guide the final design. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more.

John Scott, UX Director
+ 44 20 7471 8500 | jscott@contentformula.com | LinkedIn

Many intranets fail because they are designed and launched without ever being tested on real users.

It’s important to involve users in the design through workshops and interviews, but it’s even more important they help you test the site early on.

Fortunately, you don’t even have to wait until the site is built. We use wire framing software that allows us to create clickable, interactive prototypes. We can use these to simulate content, information architecture, page layouts, and even the functionality of a real intranet.

These interactive wire frames are useful for getting feedback from business stakeholders, however you can also put them in front of employees and ask them to complete a set of typical tasks, such as completing an expense claim or finding an internal vacancy in another country.

We invite around twenty employees to take part in our wireframe testing sessions, it’s best if theyre from different departments, countries, and levels of seniority. One by one we ask them to complete a set of around fifteen tasks using our interactive prototypes. We ask people to think out loud and tell us what they’re thinking as they make decisions and click through the pages.

It’s really interesting to run these sessions because it can be surprising what people struggle with. It gives us an opportunity to revise our wireframes and make sure we fix problems before we move into the build phase. This all saves precious time and money, and helps us to deliver an intranet which is already validated by employees.

View John’s next video: good graphic design.
View John’s previous video: getting the navigation right.
Browse all ‘intranet planning’ videos.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Planning your new intranet – getting the navigation right (video)

Posted on by John Scott

In the fourth of our planning your new intranet videos, John explains how online ‘card’ sorting can help discover the navigation structure that suits your people. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more.

John Scott, UX Director
+ 44 20 7471 8500 | jscott@contentformula.com | LinkedIn

One of the first things you define when designing a new intranet is the navigation, what information sits where. We decide first on the top level items, then the second level, and so on.

How well the navigation is structured will have a big influence on the success of an intranet. Therefore, rather than just guessing and hoping we get it right, we like to test early on with real users and make sure that our navigation really does make sense. This can all be done before any of the site is built using a technique called tree testing.

What we do is give the user two things. First, a piece of information that they need to find on the intranet. The second thing is that we actually give them the top level of the navigation. The user then has to click on the item in that navigation that they think will contain the piece of information they’re looking for. And they do that then through the levels, until they reach the end of the navigation.

This is all done using online software which means that you can invite a large number of people to participate, and that gives you more meaningful results. This software normally includes analysis tools that allows you to see where people struggled to find the right information. Also you can see where people made the wrong decision and decided to backtrack. It’s best to ask users to try and find information that you struggled to categorise yourself. These are often the areas of most debate, and theyre the ones you need to find consensus on.

View John’s next video: prototype testing.
View John’s previous video: defining intranet architecture.
Browse all ‘intranet planning’ videos.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Planning your new intranet – defining information architecture (video)

Posted on by John Scott

In the third of our series on planning your new intranet, John talks about involving end-users to inform the structure and navigation of your intranet. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more.

John Scott, UX Director
+ 44 20 7471 8500 | jscott@contentformula.com | LinkedIn

Businesses are complex, even if they don’t have a lot of staff, they have a lot of information, different processes and terminology. A big part of designing an effective intranet is making sure that we define the right information architecture.

The information architecture, or I.A., is basically the structuring of information, how we should organise things. The problem with this is that everyone seems to see this in a different way, everyone has a different mental model. So what we need to do is find the consensus so that we create an information architecture which makes sense to the most people possible.

In order to understand how different users see the business and how we should organise the information we run a series of card sorting sessions. Card sorting is a design technique that involves users. We write different topics of information on individual cards and then we ask the users to group those cards into logical categories.

There are two types of card sorting. An open sort is where the participants can invent their own categories, and this is useful when you’re creating a new site and you need to define a completely new information architecture. A closed sort is different, in this case the participants, have to categorise the information into pre-existing groups. And this is useful if you’ve got an existing information architecture and you need to bring in a lot of new information in to it.

The old fashioned way to do card sorting is face to face with users, using actual physical cards. It’s more time consuming but you do get more qualitative insight because you get to ask people what they’re thinking as they perform the task. Alternatively you can use online software to run your card sorting exercise. This is good because it gives you a larger sample size and you can get more quantitative insight. Such software often comes with built-in analysis tools that allow you to make more sense of the data. Ultimately whichever way you run your card sorting you should find that you have an improved sense of the I.A. that will resonate most with the majority of users.

View John’s next video: getting the navigation right.
View John’s previous video: end-user interviews.
Browse all ‘intranet planning’ videos.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Let's discuss your project...

Book in a live demo with us to discuss your project and find out more about our services, solutions and how we can add value to your digital workplace. Simply fill out the form and pick a time and date in our calendar.

Alternatively, if you have a question and would like more information about Content Formula, please visit our contact us page.

We look forward to meeting you.

Looking to transform your digital workplace? Subscribe to our newsletters for innovative insights and ideas.

We use cookies to give you the best experience on our site. By continuing to use our website, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. To find more about the cookies, please see our cookie notice. You can also read about our privacy policy.
Got it