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Intranet Design vs. Internet Design
How is Designing for an Intranet Different? (continued) Keep in mind that intranet users aren't on their own dime like they are when they're at home surfing the net. On an intranet, they're on the company's dime. Every second that they spend on an intranet site costs the company money. Accordingly, as an intranet designer, it's your job to help them find what they're looking for quickly, so that they can leave your site and move on to other work. While your intranet sites should have a pleasing appearance, it should not incorporate fancy aesthetic features such as flash or animation. So, it's not surprising that companies ARE willing to spend extra time on finding ways to test and improve usability for their intranets. Increased usability on an intranet is especially important because any improvement has a direct impact on a company's bottom line. As usability improves, employees spend less time locating needed information, and they have more time to get more work done. A study done
by Jakob Nielsen found that when companies devoted about 10% of
a project's budget to usability testing for the project's intranet
site, the usability of the site improved by 135%. Obviously, it
costs less to do usability testing before launching a new site
than to waste employees' time. For the most part, usability testing for intranet sites is the same as usability for Internet sites. The main goal is still to gather a representative group to test out tasks. Your representative group will, of course, be employees, but you'll need to make sure these employees work in a wide variety of areas in the company. You'll want employees from many departments and many levels-from entry level to executive. At my company,
we have a server that is dedicated to sites that are in a developmental
stage. So, when I want to do informal user testing, I can publish
my sites on the developmental server and then send links to people
in different departments. I ask them to look at the site, maybe
complete a task, and then provide me with feedback. Of course, there isn't a way to test your intranet against other companies' intranets, since you don't have access to them. However, there may be people working for your company who have had past experience with other companies, and you can interview them about their comparisons of the different intranets they've seen. According
to Nielsen, the most important usability characteristics are:
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