Intranet Home Page Variations

This is a follow up to a previous article: Intranet Home Page Design. The image above summarises the four types of interaction with an Intranet home page. This post looks at some different page layouts to consider to support those interactions and the outcomes they lead to. For each sample, there is a short summary of the pros and cons along with tips for when to use and when to avoid.

When deciding on an Intranet home page layout for your organisation, it’s important to consider what your organisation is, not what people say it is or would like it to be. Don’t put the weight of change onto your intranet project. Rather, change first and then design your intranet to match and help.

Sample 1: Activity Focused

If it looks vaguely familiar, you’ve probably visited Facebook at some point during the past few years… The only difference is a Welcome note where the Update box would be.

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Pros

• Covers all four styles of interaction
• Minimal eye-movement required – go top/left for specifics, go middle/right for browsing

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Cons

• High maintenance – you need frequently updated news, promotions and activities or a big chunk of the home page goes stale very quickly

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This style works well for organisations that openly encourage knowledge sharing and collaborative work. Particularly for larger or mobile organisations where people are likely to be spread across different locations and don’t have the benefit of frequent face-to-face interactions. The intranet becomes the unifying hub to go to if you want to find out what’s going on, as well as look up or complete everyday activities. It often becomes the default starting point for accessing all systems, with news and promotions adopting a more portal layout than web publishing. Whilst the activity stream is essentially ‘user generated’ content, there are still significant benefits from having centralised internal communications roles. But instead of being focused on creating and broadcasting ‘one size fits all’ content, activities will shift to listening and surfacing useful content – increasing the signal : noise ratio.

Tip: Do not add an Activity Stream until you have successfully implemented the source(s) of the activity stream. Likely to be an enterprise social networking tool such as Yammer or Jive. And successful implementation means that updates are being regularly posted by a wide audience at least nine months after launch. Anything less and it is still a trial evaluation that means it is not yet ready for a place on your Intranet home page.

Sample 2: Navigation focus

This is the minimalist layout. Minimal because it usually only changes when there’s a reorganisation and the list of departments changes. Or a new system is deployed (or old one retired) and the list of available actions changes.

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Pros

• Quick to view, quick to move on
• Very low maintenance

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Cons

• Won’t win design awards
• Doesn’t encourage content sharing

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This style works well for organisations where knowledge-sharing primarily occurs within teams rather than across the business. Such organisations tend to perform highly specialised processes and the intranet is for quickly getting the essential or irregular basic tasks done. An organisation that adopts this style of home page does so because most people perform the majority of their work in other systems. The intranet is just a gap-filler and not a conversation hub. No central team is required for ongoing content updates or moderation.

Tip: Whilst this may look boring to many, it can be very effective. You can liven the page up with external sources such as an automatic news feed. But for many, it’s clean, quick and simple to navigate.  The two local navigation sections are divided by action (what do you need to do?) or by department (where do you need to go?).

Sample 3: News focus

This is one of the most common base styles, emphasising internal communications.

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Pros

• Can be made very visual
• A lot of recent updates can be directly accessed from home page

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Cons

• High central maintenance overhead – only works if you have a team curating regular news updates
• Monthly items can make a home page feel stale for 3 weeks of every month

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This style works well for organisations that are very news-oriented, either for internal delivery of communications and/or by the nature of the business. For everyone else, it can be a costly overhead to have an internal news team producing sufficient media to keep the home page from going stale. But that doesn’t stop it from being a popular request. Many want to control communications and push content out across the business. How successful the theory converts to reality depends on the culture of the organisation and end-user priorities

Tip: Similar to the activity stream, make sure that the sources of content are well established before creating this style of home page. It can look very stylish in conceptual design but only works in practice with great, well produced content that people want to view. Are you ready to invest in the talent required to deliver? At a time when the trend is towards user-generated content that better suits an activity stream…

General tips and tricks

Those were just three sample layouts showing how different types of interaction benefit from very different home page styles. Here are some general tips and tricks to consider when designing your intranet home page

• What sort of organisation are you? It’s important to match the style with your culture as it is, not as you would like it to be. Enterprise social networks (ESNs) and activity streams benefit organisations that are very ‘chatty’ with an open culture where information is easily shared and where people are frequently mobile and/or not closely located. ESNs struggle in closed environments where information is kept tightly managed and secured, and have limited value in small offices where everyone is onsite and closely located.
• Does the content exist today? If not, prioritise getting it created and established before adding as a section to the intranet home page. Make sure the effort can be maintained beyond the initial flush of popularity/curiosity. This is one of the biggest causes of intranet project failures – designing a concept that looks fabulous but cannot be realistically maintained over the long term. It usually requires a centralised team of content producers and/or moderators to maintain momentum
• Not sure where to start? Begin by understanding which types of interaction matter most to most people. Ask people which they would prefer – to catch-up on news or find the staff handbook. Observe how they navigate the current intranet (or other systems if you don’t yet have one – they morph out of all sorts of alternatives, including file shares…). In my experience, most intranet projects follow the 80:20 rule. 80% of visits are for a specific need and so use the navigation and search. However, 80% of design effort tends to end up focusing on browse-based activities, i.e. internal news and promotions. Align priorities!
• Invest in good classification and enterprise search tweaks to make content as discoverable as possible. Don’t expect your search to be ‘just like Google’. On the Internet, content wants to be found. Content owners have a vested interest in getting on to the first results page of any Internet search engine. The same will never be as true for internal content – people have other priorities.
• You can no longer assume a minimum screen size. Intranets are increasingly being accessed from mobile devices and screen sizes can range from 4 inches to 40+ inches. Follow internet conventions as much as possible to make it easy for your home page to have a responsive design that automatically rearranges menus and sidebars to optimise for access from a range of different devices.
• And finally… don’t assume people will always begin from the Intranet home page. You may want it to be the default starting point for all web-based activities. But the reality is that people will often enter the intranet from a direct link sent via email or instant message. And as intranets become redesigned for more mobile interactions, there may be multiple start points. Each a separate ‘app’.  The intranet home page should be the fall-back option. The place people know to go if they don’t have a direct link or app to begin from.

To close, it’s back to the comment made at the start. When deciding on an Intranet home page layout for your organisation, it’s important to consider what your organisation is, not what people say it is or would like it to be. Don’t put the weight of change onto your intranet project. Rather, change first and then design your intranet to match and help support that change.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!

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• Intranet Home Page Design
• Creating Successful Intranets
• Practical Design Tips for Web Sites