Techniques to build, engage and manage your intranet project

Rebecca Jackson

Social Media Manager, Melbourne Water

@_rebeccajackson #intranetsaus

The bit about me

• Social Media Manager at Melbourne Water

• Business lead for the Intranet Redevelopment

• Soon to be Community Engagement Manager at Seamless CMS

• Sometime sketcher

• Find me on:

– Twitter: @_rebeccajackson

– Blog: rebeccajacksonblogs.wordpress.com

– www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccajljackson

The bit about you

• Name

• Role

• Company

• Why you signed up for this workshop

Agenda

• Why bother with engagement

• How can you engage your organisation

• In depth and activities

– Stakeholders and business representatives

– Personas

– Information Architecture

• Resources

Why bother with engagement

It’s their intranet

Supports a solid business case

Early buy-in leads to project success

Different perspectives

Beppie CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr

Discussion

• What engagement blockers are there in your organisation?

How you can engage your organisation

Requirements gathering

• It’s their intranet, you need to know what they NEED

• Builds initial awareness about the project

• Do it through

– Focus groups

– Surveys

– Interviews

Business Representative Group

• Representation from across the business

• Keep updated about the project

• Input into key project tasks

• Quick access to what the business needs

We’ll look at this one in more detail later

Personas

• Represent your typical intranet users

• Basis for design decisions

• Quick reference to user perspective

• Tool when talking to project stakeholders

We’ll look at this one in more detail later

Show and tell sessions

• Take every opportunity to talk about the project

• Show designs and progress

• Don’t be afraid about feedback

Information Architecture

• Based on clear principles

• Users do the work

– Card sorting

– Tree testing

We’ll look at this one in more detail later

Usability testing

• Users follow scenarios

• Issues are recorded

• Where practical, worked into development or the upgrade path

User acceptance testing

• Project team follows formal scripts

• Users do ‘exploratory testing’

• They become familiar with the system

• Find issues that scripts don’t

Stakeholders

Why do you need your stakeholders?

• Stakeholders can help when you need someone with ‘pull’

• When you need help with tasks, they are already engaged

• Change management is easier with more people across it

• Keeps the project ‘honest’ and close to user needs

Who are they?

• Sponsor

• Project leadership team

• Project team

• Business Representative Group

• Business Champions

• Content Owners and Authors

• Users

Business Representative Group

More regular and intensive involvement in broader project

tasks.

Business Champions

Less regular involvement in more specific tasks to understand business needs and test the new

intranet.

Content SMEs and Authors

Targeted involvement to learn how to write content, use the publishing tool and in the ongoing maintenance of content.

Business stakeholders structure

Example project structure

Sponsor

Project Leadership Team

Project Manager Business Lead

Business reps

Business Representative Group

Business champions

Authors / SMEs

Project streams

Design Technology

Change / comms Governance

Content

IT Lead

How to choose your business reps

• Organisational structure

• Business function

• Content area

• Volunteer (or Voluntold)

Activity

1. Who are your key stakeholders

2. Choose your business representatives:

– Select an approach (or combination)

– Note who you would like to involve or what teams/business units

3. How will you approach your business reps?

Personas

Why Personas?

• Understand user needs

• Make usability a focus

• Deliver on needs, not wants

• Prioritise design decisions

• Reduce testing expense

• Change management

• DIY vs consultant

Process

• Research

• Interview

• Analyse

• Report

Research

• Use existing data if available

– HR System

– Prior research

– Information from other projects

• Workshop with a selection of staff

Interview

• 15 users is a good, manageable number

• Cover a range of demographics

– i.e. age, location, tenure, job level

• Questions

– Demographic

– Seek to find pain points

– Learn top tasks

• Observation at the interviewees desk

Analyse

• Review data

• Look for themes

• Pick out great quotes

• Group themes to build personas

• Use data to build profiles

Report

• Aim for 6-8 personas

• Choose your level of detail

• Give personas names

• Select images

– Stock vs staff

• Consider audience and format

Personas

Natalie the

New Starter

Anita the

Author

Karen the

Knowledge Worker

Peter the

People Manager

Austin

the Operator

http://www.christinanghiem.com/corbis-personas.html

http://www.userinsight.com/personas-done-right-way/

https://ebiinterfaces.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/personas-for-the-ebi-resdesign/

Activity

1. As individuals, write down 3 or more questions you could ask during a persona interview.

The aim being to understand:

– About them

– Their job

– How they use the intranet

Information architecture

Why Information Architecture?

• Supports findability of your content

• If you’re starting from scratch, you need a structure

• If you’re rebuilding, you need to know if it’s working

Approaches

• Top-down

• Bottom-up

• Hybrid

Process

• Understand existing content (content inventory)

• Find out what content needs there are (through interviews)

• Optional: look at similar organisations, what do they do?

• Create principles – the rules of the IA

• Set up activities to structure content (card-sorting)

• Test the structure (tree-testing)

• Settle on a structure

• Continuously improve

IA Principles

• Before you start creating your structure, it helps to have rules to guide it

• When creating the structure, it guides decisions

• Once the structure is ‘set’ it guides any changes

Where does the IA come from

• Existing intranet (content inventory)

• Other systems

Activity

• As a group let’s create some rules for our information architecture

Example of some IA principles

• Doesn’t need to reflect old structure• Content should have one home• Not reflective of the organisational structure• Must make sense to new starters• Names should avoid group/team names where practical• No repetitive suffixes or prefixes (i.e. my… or our… or your…)• Top level fixed• Designed for flexibility at the lower levels• Top level, not too many, not too few (5-8)

Card sorting

• A technique used to sort and categorise information

• Informs heading titles

• Gives structure to the information

• Prioritises information

Open vs closed

• Open: users sort cards and create their own category headings

• Closed: you define the category headings and users sort into those

Tree testing

• A method to validate and challenge an information architecture

• Valuable to do after card-sorting

The basics:

• Create scenarios for a user to find information on the intranet

• Based on the scenario, users should try to find content unguided

• Use results to update the IA if needed

Online vs Offline

Online

• Easy to run and set up

• Sometimes requires a license for a tool

• Quicker to analyse results

• Can include more people

• Less bias

Offline

• Takes time to set up and coordinate

• More hands on

• Limits the number of people

• Can observe decision making

Activity

• Mock card-sorting session

Articles

Personas• rebeccajacksonblogs.wordpress.com/2013/09/19/diy-intranet-

personas• www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_personas• www.uxforthemasses.com/personasCard sorting• http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/cardsorting• http://boxesandarrows.com/card-sorting-a-definitive-guideTree testing• http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_treetesting

Further reading

• A practical guide to Information Architecture – Donna Spencer http://maadmob.com.au/training/books/practical-ia

• Designing intranets: creating sites that work – James Robertson http://store.steptwo.com.au/product/designing-intranets/

Thank you participating

• Twitter: @_rebeccajackson

• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccajljackson

• Blog: rebeccajacksonblogs.wordpress.com