I spent a lot of time working with the UK Government, for a department within the Home Office. When I arrived, the intranet really was a disaster. Although 16,000 people had access to it – it managed an abysmal total of just 5100 page views each year. None of the staff used it. It was hated as a resource and it really did suck.
I could easily see why no-one dared to visit:
- The menus and header backgrounds were bright pink, with light pink writing. The body content was pale yellow, or blue, or sometimes orange, depending on the site section.
- Content had not been updated for months.
- There were broken links peppered throughout the site.
- The sum total of one department’s contribution was an animated “Under Construction” image, followed by two capitalized words: “COMING SOON!”
- Most pages started with something like “Welcome to the XYZ Department Pages. Fred is the Head of XYZ. We strive to provide timely XYZ services to a wide customer base blah blah blah zzzzzzzzzzzz.”
- Nothing was task driven. The site really was just a load of vanity publishing about the head of the department and the size of their empire.
I was part of a new team brought in “to maintain and refresh” the intranet.
We did all the usual things, focus groups, persona profiling, user testing, surveys, and some education about how important usability is.
It took 1 year to get it all straightened out. Rambling descriptions of departments’ organization charts disappeared. They were replaced with tools and information on the services departments offered - like poster or booklet design, or submitting expenses.
As a result the number of pages views went up from 5000 to 8 million in a year! We were really pleased.
We gave a prize to the person who saw the 1 millionth page impression and wrote a feature on it, to help promote the site had changed for the better.
Once that was done, there was renewed interest in publishing within the departments – people wanted to be contributing again - unfortunately, they still wanted to add the old dull stuff the users were not interested in! Doh!
How did we solve that problem?
We took 4 main steps to retain control.
- All contributors went though the in-house usability course we put together before they could start any web projects.
- I implemented Organization Level Agreements (OLAs) which are normally used by in-house IT departments to explain the terms of the service users needed to abide by. I adapted the idea to cover publishing on the intranet. It was the only way to re-assert authority.
This agreement explained how long it would take to add their content to the site if they asked us to publish on their behalf, for example. It also said we reserved the right to remove, reformat or relocate information that was harming the user experience and site credibility.
- All pages needed review by dates before they could be published. We reserved the right to edit or remove any dated content once that date was passed. We also used it as a (nice
) veiled threat – “You have 2 months to get your information reviewed, or we might have to remove it….” so people started thinking about reviewing their content in good time. Otherwise it always ended up a last minute rush job.
- Any department who wanted to do a major overhaul had to run a user session with 1 of our team to scope the requirements and make sure the content to be added was going to be user centered.
These steps put the intranet team back in control of the content – useful when the organization structure is very rigid and it was common place for senior managers to “pull rank” to get their own way.
If you end up in this situation, try out some of these techniques to put usability back at the forefront of your intranet.
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