Despite investment of $12B, the US Navy Marine Corps Intranet Still Sucks, Says the GAO
One
of the tasks in my current work contract is to assess and make
recommendations for improvement to the organization’s Intranet and
Extranet sites. To do this assessment, I did some research to identify
the characteristics of a well-designed Intranet or Extranet, and then
consulted with my brilliant Toronto KM colleagues (Sandra, Howard,
Richard, Gordon, Greg and Ted). We came up with these sixteen standards:
- Simple and intuitive user interface and architecture:
Users should not require training or explanation to use the site. It
should not be intimidating, nor should it require a lot of thought or
practice to use it effectively.
- Easy orientation:
The entire content ‘landscape’ should be visible or at least apparent
from the home page. No navigation tool or sitemap should be needed.
- No overlap with content of the organization’s other websites:
This entails knowing who the site’s ‘customers’ are, and when they
should use an Intranet or Extranet versus a public Internet website.
Generally, the Intranet is for employees and contractors, the Extranet
is for ‘real’ customers of the organization’s goods and services, and
the public Internet site is for prospective customers, alumni,
prospective recruits, students, researchers, and the public media.
Where there is overlap of content between these user constituencies it
probably makes sense to repurpose the content for different audiences
anyway.
- Table-, macro- or CSS-driven:
Changes and additions to content should not require html recoding.
External websites may benefit from occasional refreshing or redesign
for aesthetic or market-driven reasons, but internal site design should
be driven by functionality and be changed as little and as rarely as
possible.
- ‘Bookmarkable’: Every resource should have its own unique URL that users can bookmark and find their way back to. That means no frames.
- Expandable: The site should accommodate new individual and group web resources (e.g. blogs, wikis) without a need for redesign.
- One-click access:
Users should be able to get from the home page to the resource they
seek in a single click. That may require use of menus that only show up
when you hover, or scroll through lists in small windows, to prevent
the home page being overwhelming.
- ‘Taskonomy’ rather than taxonomy: In the site’s design, architecture and organization, ‘why are you looking?’ should prevail over ‘what are you looking for?’
- Personally reconfigurable:
Menus or scroll lists should be able to be personalized to accommodate
each user’s browsing orientation (i.e. viewed/resorted in different
ways).
- User-driven content and tools:
Content and tools offered on the site should be what users have
indicated they want, rather than what ‘suppliers’ of content want the
site to host. Likewise, content should be organized according to user’s
needs, not the content supplier’s convenience. For example, internal
news should be delivered through subscribable e-newsletters (see
standard #14 below), instead of cluttering up Intranet and Extranet
home pages.
- Tools, not just content:
The site should provide simple access to all the connectivity and other
tools and technologies (both web-based and downloadable) that users
need to perform their jobs effectively, along with online learning
resources for each tool that teach users how and when to use each tool.
- Search in context:
Each search bar should only search a predefined subset of relevant
content, not everything on the site that meets the search terms. The
home page should therefore have different search bars for different
purposes (e.g. search for people, search for documents, search for
news, etc.) Nothing discourages users from ever visiting a site again
more than lots of ‘false positives’ in search results.
- Use of clickable graphics:
Recognizing their higher development and maintenance cost, selective
use should be made of ‘active’ graphics (e.g. organization charts,
process charts) where these make finding or browsing easier or more
effective.
- Really simple publication and subscription:
Sites should use RSS to allow users to ‘publish’ their content to the
Intranet or Extranet, and to allow them to subscribe to a wide variety
of internal and external content using a single ‘sign up’, and get that
content delivered the way the user chooses (e.g. e-mail, aggregator
page).
- Accommodates different ways of finding: The site should give users three choices to find the information they’re looking for: browse, search, or subscribe.
- Security is ‘under the hood’:
Depending on your IDs and passwords (stored on your machine) users
shouldn’t need extra sign-ins and log-in steps, and they shouldn’t see
what they don’t and shouldn’t have access to (to avoid both temptation
and resentment).
I’ve designed a website for my client that
meets these onerous standards (sorry, I can't share it yet), but since
this client does not currently have a large amount of content to share,
this was not that difficult a task. I suspect that for large
organizations with well-entrenched legacy systems, meeting these
standards would be imposing, perhaps even prohibitive. But I’m always
amazed at what good designers and programmers can come up with
remarkably quickly and inexpensively.
If you have an Intranet or
Extranet in your organization, how close does it come to meeting these
standards? Are we missing some important characteristics of great
sites? And does the value of most sites’ content and tools even warrant
the investment in upgrading they, or would such an upgrades just reveal
how thin, stale and useless their current content and tools really are?
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