Prescient's Catherine Elder highlights some of the common audience challenges on a website or intranet:

1. Senior staff want something to go on the home page, and then something else and something else and so on

2. Users complain that they can’t find information or that it is buried deep within the bowels of the site and it takes forever to find it or is impossible to remember where it is

Both these problems are being experienced not only on intranets but also on external websites.

Read all of Catherine Elder's article on Developing personas

“I can’t find anything!” At the risk of sounding repetitive, this is still the number one complaint of most employees at most organizations, regardless of size, industry and geographic location. Notwithstanding the effectiveness of the search engine which,  more often than not, is rated as being somewhere between “awful” and “piss-poor”, Information architecture is often the top priority of most intranet managers when undertaking a redesign.

Information architecture (IA) is mostly science with a dash of art. As it relates to the intranet, the IA is best represented by a site map or organization chart of the major information or content categories (parents) and the sub-categories (children) and how they all relate to each other.

Information architecture is defined by the Information Architecture Institute as:

1. The structural design of shared information environments.
2. The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support findability and usability.
3. An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

The ultimate goal of the intranet manager, architect and consultant is to create an ‘intuitive’ IA – information categories and navigation paths that are intuitive or easily understood at a glance.’ Of course the principal challenge of any information architect is that what is intuitive to one person is not always intuitive to another – and is sometimes not intuitive to others.

When redesigning an intranet or portal there is a natural inclination by some architects and consultants to reinvent the IA to best reflect ‘best practices’ and/or the IA or labels used by other clients with successful and intuitive IAs. This of course is a dangerous trap as no outside consultant or architect could truly appreciate and know intimately the culture and both formal and informal corporate nomenclature as those who have worked for an organization for years. Furthermore, legacy labels and nomenclature considered awkward or poorly named by the architect redesigning the IA are in fact reinforced and validated by years of employee use. For example, the content category “HR” is not a very cool label employed by design firms and architects who have come to use cute, new millennia labels like:

Ü      People Place

Ü      My Services

Ü      Employee Central

None of these labels are wrong per se, but if employees have spent years finding benefits and compensation information and tools under the “HR” section, why would anyone change the label? Frankly, there better be a solid, demonstrated reason for doing so or risk further confusing employees who demand simplicity.

Firstly, no two organizations are the same. Notwithstanding different industries and services, each organization (even closely related competitors) may in fact differ in very significant ways:

Ü      Corporate priorities

Ü      Corporate values

Ü      Target audience & customer base

Ü      Management

Ü      Culture

Ü      Geographic locations

Ü      Personal life experiences and preferences

Ü      Career path & development

All of the above factors, any many others (including dozens and perhaps hundreds of sub-factors), influence an individual employee’s definition of “intuitive”. Therefore applying labels and schema from one company to another makes absolutely no sense and is reckless in principal.

So while reinventing an intranet’s information architecture from scratch, and removing common and generally accepted labels and information paths is counter-productive, there are some general lessons to be learned (though not always universally applicable):

Ü      The vast majority of practical content should be no more than 3 clicks from the home page (this is impossible with millions of pages of content, but note the emphasis on majority)

Ü      Major parent categories (major sections or channels that represent virtually all the content on a corporate intranet) should be limited to 6 or 8 including sections for:

o        About Us (Corporate profile, business structure, bios, directory, etc.)

o        News (news stories, announcements, events, etc.)

o        HR (human resource related information and tools)

o        Products & Services (and/or Customer related information)

o        Forms & Tools (an aggregate section of links or originals)

o        Manuals & Policies (an aggregate section of links or originals)

o        Other common parent categories (relevant to some organizations but not others include:

§         Customer service

§         Career / Learning

§         Executive Corner

§         Roles / Dashboards (sales, operations, administrative, etc.)

§         Library / Reference

Ü      Beware of catch-all sections such as “Resources” or “Information” that become dumping grounds for everything that doesn’t fit in other sections rather than finding it a true home

Ü      Navigational / usability elements such as Search, Site Map, Help, Contact Us, Feedback, etc. need not be in a parent category per se, but should be available in the main navigation banner and/or footer

Ü      Card sorting exercises that allow users to determine content groupings and labels are extremely valuable for fixing navigation and usability problems

Ü      Do not bury or overlook highly desirable but not necessarily mission-critical items that are usually very highly sought by employees including:

o        Cafeteria menus

o        Buy-and-sell / Classifieds

o        Job postings

o        Weather forecast

o        Office locations & maps

Most corporate intranets feature weak information architectures that require careful thought and some work to enhance. But completely scraping and reinventing the IA at the expense of years of common, learned behavior may well further confuse and irritate your employees who are already complaining that they “can’t find anything!”

RELATED READING:

Information architecture for the intranet

Information Architecture - the science of site layout

Smell the intranet scent

Pick a Card (sort), any card

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Part art, but mostly science, information architecture should have little to do with best practices, and more to do with the needs of the target audience. In other words, other companies with successful intranets don’t necessarily translate effectively to your intranet; you need to understand what will work for employees.

Simply put, information architecture (IA) is a method of organizing or classifying information. It the world of intranets, an IA is most commonly represented as a site map or flow chart with the home page at the top, and the major sections or parent groups represented below.

Tertiary or third tier pages and sections are represented below those sections and connected by lines (like those in an organization chart) representing the working links between pages and sections.

In a recent study of some 56 intranets represented in a new report on Intranet Information Architecture by the Nielsen Norman Group, the study reveals that there are some sections or labels in the top parent group or major section pages that are quite ubiquitous including:

• News
• Human resources
• Company information

Nonetheless, what works in one organization does not necessarily work in another. News will ring as meaningful in most organizations but Policies can have a different meaning from one organization to the next; hence the need to understand employee culture and language when developing an intranet IA.

Just to give you a sample, here are the major parent or section labels at the top of the IA for five recent intranet clients of Prescient Digital Media (some were developed by Prescient, others represent an IA developed by the client prior to Prescient working with it):

1. Inside company – Our Business – People Place
2. News – Products / Services – Client Connect – Circulars – People
3. My company – Our projects – Our company – Individual spec – Specialties – Tools, forms & links – Help
4. Our Company – Marketing – Bus Develop & Program Mgmt – Employee Needs & HR – Internal Resources – Help
5. About company – News – How do I? – Employee Central – Organization – Customers – Processes

Frankly, I think some of the IAs and labels are appalling poor. But does my opinion count? What are the best practices that should be applied to these companies and their intranet IA? Or is the employee perspective the most important criteria?

The employee perspective trumps best practices every time. I have no clue what ‘Client Connect’ is but you can bet that the client’s employees do. That’s not to say that outside expertise and best practices should be ignored, they should be weighed and considered and used to influence the IA. Nor does it mean that better labels can't necessarily be found...

Each of the companies represented by the IAs above range in size from hundreds to tens of thousands of employees, and each represent incredibly diverse industries. Each has their own culture, their own vernacular, and most importantly, a ‘heritage information architecture’.

This last point is critical, and often discounted at many organizations by many consultants who want to showcase their ‘expertise’ in IA by reinventing a company’s information vernacular. If every employee in the organization has been using an intranet for years, and has very often used the HR section that is a well-known destination, does it make sense to rename it as ‘People’ or ‘My Work’...? Probably not, but it’s the employees’ decision.

There are four key tools for engaging employees to help craft and test and IA:

• Usability testing
• Card sorting
• Focus groups
• Log (metrics) analysis

Using multiple tools judiciously and impartially are tantamount to developing a successful architecture. Collectively, employees know the best IA for the organization (did you know that for the old ‘guess the jellybeans in the jar’ that the average guess of all the guesses is almost always closer than the closest guess? Think about it….)

Tapping employee knowledge requires care and skill without prejudice and an appreciation for the unique culture of the organization. An information architecture should principally be driven and designed by employees, with the outside influence of best practices, but not at the expense of common sense and cultural legacy.

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Middle managers spend more than a quarter of their time searching for information necessary to their jobs, and when they do find it, it is often wrong, according to results of an Accenture study.

The proliferation of different information sources within organizations was revealed by the survey as the most important reason why managing information is proving difficult.

Among the key findings:

• WASTED TIME:
• Managers spend up to two hours a day searching for information
• 42% said they accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week
• 57% of respondents said that having to go to numerous sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing information for their jobs
• NO VALUE:
• More than 50% of the information managers obtain has no value to them
• 53% said that less than half of the information they receive is valuable
• POOR MANAGEMENT:
• Only half of all managers believe their companies do a good job in governing information distribution or have established adequate processes
• 59% said that as a consequence of poor information distribution, they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day
• POOR FUNDING:
• Only 11% of finance and accounting managers — less than for any other function — said they believe that their company has invested enough in the right technologies to help them get the information they need

The amount of wasted time and money is staggering.

Every year there are several studies touting the same thing: employees are wasting too much time searching for information. But no one in senior management (few) believes these studies. However, I and the staff at Prescient spend hundreds of hours a year inside medium and large size corporations and not-for-profits and find the same thing from the many hundreds of managers and employees we talk to: “we can’t find anything.”

Staff at all levels are wasting far too much time searching for information and the intranet is often a cruel hoax; often touted as the ‘one-stop’ source or gateway to ‘all your information needs’ the intranet almost always fails the unreasonable expectation. The problem is part planning, part information architecture, part process, part people, and part funding.

If corporations would spend more money on their intranets, instead of treating it as a cost center, these same corporations would have more productive employees. Ironically, CEOs and senior management are absolutely obsessed with employee productivity. Employee productivity, along with competitive advantage and shareholder return, is a major priority. But little is done aside from cost cutting.

The onus is on you, you the intranet manager or consultant. You have to build the business case that sells the benefit for rebuilding or redesigning the intranet in such a way that employees spend less time searching, and more time doing their jobs.

To measure and increase the value of your intranet, please dowload the free white paper, Finding ROI.

Read more…

Intranet redesign: building a business case

Intranet Business Case (back issue)

Measuring Intranet Value: Proving & Delivering ROI

Fixing a broken intranet

Intranet Business Case (back issue)

“Ask them how they would like to find the information. ...asking them, from a user’s point of view and taking away the organizational silo’d glasses, how would you like to find the information logically?” writes Carm Porco, GM & VP of Prescient Digital Media. “For example, in an intranet, if I wanted to fill out my expense sheet, would I like to go to employee forms or an employee central area or go by way of the old process and find the department that has the form and look under their silo’d site.”

KISS - Keep it simple stupid

Information architecture should be focused on making it easier to understand and navigate content -- as quickly as possible. The above image was one of those that was delivered when I did a Google image search for "information architecture." My reaction to the information architect that (hypothetically)handed this to me... "Well, it sure is pretty, and clearly you're a very smart person... but you're fired."

Keep it simple. For example, I would never have an architecture with more than 6-8 parent groups unless I was forced at gunpoint -- or bribed. Card sorting is an exercise in simplicity and well help keep the focus simple. It itself is a simplistic exercise in understanding how employees think about content and navigation, from the employee perspective. A perspective that cannot be obtained through focus groups and user surveys.

However, card sorting shouldn’t be done at the expense of best practices and professional information architecture (IA). I would never start from scratch a first attempt of an information architecture with card sorting. I would use card sorting to revise and tweak a professionally prepared IA. Few organizations could afford to do cart sorting exercises with a scientifically representative sample of employees (100 or 200), nor should they be expected to.

Firstly, build a full intranet plan or blueprint – including strategic directives such as a mission and goals – and then have a professional craft the first draft of an information architecture based upon that plan (and the preceding intranet assessment). Once you’ve made your first attempt at an IA, and then take the IA to working sessions with your key stakeholders to focus on their areas (e.g. HR for the human resources section or site). It is at this point, when you’re engaging stakeholder groups that it is most valuable to undertake a card sorting exercise.

Read Carm Porco’s Pick a Card (sort), any card.