Five reasons your intranet potentially sucks (it could be to do with HiPPos)

A lot of attention is spent on customer-facing websites. After all, that’s what brings in the money or is at the heart of your digital service. However, many intranets are lying neglected and could be a hidden cancer damaging your organisation.

Of course, there are new tools disrupting internal communications and working practices such as Slack, but for many organisations, the intranet still is an essential place for organisational knowledge, document management and increasingly a place to get work done.

Here are 5 reasons your intranet potentially sucks.

It’s built around the organisation, not the user

Whilst externally to be truly successful your organisation’s website service needs to be built around the customer the same is true internally. If your intranet is simply a place for your staff to be bombarded with messages, some of which may be relevant and some of which may not, you aren’t off to a great start. The intranet needs to be designed primarily to meet staff goals. You will only know what these are by working with them to understand what their top tasks are and how the intranet could meet their needs. Successful intranets are built around the tasks employees need to complete. Designing the structure around departments is not effective. This relies on employees knowing which department does what. The only people that really know everything a department does is the people within it. Bad intranets tend to revolve around department pages full of broadcast messages that rarely are meeting the needs of their customer. Do you have an HR landing page for example address the top 5 or so highest HR requests for service, or does it feature a blog post from the Head of HR rabbiting on about how great the HR team are?

This leads us nicely on to…

Vanity publishing

“We are great; we are great; we are great”. (Sorry to pick on HR again). If you phoned HR to ask advice about what to do if you had a member of staff going on maternity leave, you’d be pretty frustrated if they answered the phone and forced you to listen to a two-minute recording of the staff citing off their achievements and the sound of applause and back slapping. The same can happen if departments are free to run riot with their own content with no understanding of user needs or how to design content properly.

Which of course is why the next point is….

Writing for the web

The phrase “Writing for the web” applies equally to writing content for the intranet. Are your pages so full of text the minute people see it they lose the will to live and just pick up the phone for someone else to do the legwork? Or are they nicely organised so they are easy to scan with simple language that is clear and to the point, broken nicely into short paragraphs and bullet points with clear headings? If not the chances are you likely to also find that…

The homepage is run by the HiPPos

If your intranet suffers from one or more of the points covered above your homepage is probably also an abomination user interface design, bursting at the seams with content competing for attention. Many intranet homepages have hundreds of links, some duplicates, content screaming for your attention “look over here”, “no look here”, “hey, don’t forget me!” You can almost hear the home page screaming out at you.

Without an evidence/data based approach to user goals as covered in the first point, you are likely to fall into the same trap where home page design and content decisions are decided by the HiPPOs, (“highest paid person’s opinion”) without any data to back up their thought process.

Employee “Hey digital team, put this on the home page please”

Digital team “that’s not a user goal and is just vanity publishing if you add that giant graphic and make it flash it will distract people from achieving their goals and internal demand could go up”

Employee “Well the boss likes it so just put it on”

This results in a nightmare of usability and becomes a battleground of competing content likely to be irrelevant to the majority of users. It’s very similar to “Banner Syndrome” where old school marketing professionals think whilst the tools have changed the approach hasn’t, compared to digital advocates who understand the old rules have lost relevance and effectivness.

There is no strategy

Do you have an intranet strategy? Do you know what the intranet’s purpose is and do the majority of people agree? What are the top-level goals for it in the short, medium and long term? And how will you measure if you are achieving those goals?

Without a strategy, if you are considering a new intranet or have even just rolled one out, if you don’t address the points above, give it a year, no, probably six months or so, and there’s a real danger you’ll be no better off than when you started, possibly even worse off.

Do you have any experiences of intranet’s you’d like to share? Let me know in the comments below or feel free to get in touch on Twitter.