Intranet Design vs. Internet Design

Common Problems with Intranets and Possible Solutions

Company intranets usually have 10 to 100 times the number of sites and pages as their external Internet sites, but most of the time, only a fraction of the Internet development budget is devoted to developing the intranet. This status quo results in widely ineffective intranets.

One common problem with intranets, especially those of large companies, is that responsibility for the intranet development and maintenance is divided among all of the internal departments. Since each department has different ideas about content, navigation, and design, each intranet site comes out looking very unique. This creates a problem because users don't get a sense of unity on their intranet. Instead, they tend to feel lost and confused.

This problem is very evident at the company where I work, too. However, we have recently found a possible solution: we implemented internal branding. Basically, this means that although each department's content might be different, they all have to comply with the same standards of design and navigation. So, for example, the same scheme of colors and images are used on every intranet site, and the "home" link is always in the same place. Our internal branding standards have already started to make our intranet feel more connected.

We had to make sure that our internal branding standards were somewhat different from the standards we use on external Web sites, though. We wanted employees to be able to clearly understand when they were on the intranet and when they were on the Internet. This is very important in helping people figure out what information is confidential and what is public knowledge.

Another common problem on intranets is poor navigation. Employees waste a lot of time on intranet sites, looking for information that they've been told is there, but unable to find it because the navigation tools aren't helpful. Intranet design teams need to focus on setting up navigation that really works. Links should be well labeled-with logical descriptions that give users some idea about where the link will take them. When possible, multiple navigation options should be offered, such as menu tabs, headers and subheaders, and logical icons.

Jakob Nielsen has updated his listing of common Web design mistakes, and a few of them apply to intranet design:

• Horizontal scrolling. Enough said.
• Poor "Frequently Asked Questions" documents. Nielsen says that FAQs are often made up of questions that were never really asked. Users will stop finding FAQs to be helpful if they don't cover real questions.
• Too many huge blocks of text. Companies try to take publications that were formerly in print and simply scan them onto an intranet site. This doesn't work. Users can read from a screen more easily when the text is broken into short paragraphs, or when bulleting or numbering is used.
  

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