Once considered a static digital bulletin board, intranets now have the potential to support vibrant communities which add to positive employee experiences.
PHOTO:
Denys Nevozhai
Work is becoming increasingly more complex for knowledge workers. Everything is evolving, from external factors driven by customer and regulator demands, to the internal environment which includes colleagues, knowledge and software tools.
To help employees handle these challenges, companies have been providing them with an increasing array of digital tools which further complicate the digital environment. After a while, this complexity starts to have a negative effect not only on employee productivity, but on customer interactions. Over the years I have often traced operational or customer experience problems back to poorly designed digital employee experience.
In short, workplace complexity is one of the biggest challenges for modern workers.
PHOTO:
Christian Erfurt
My 2010 book Designing Intranets outlined a methodology for designing and structuring corporate intranets. More recently, Giacomo Mason released his take on the same topic, Intranet Information Architecture. Both of these books outline a simple premise: that the user experience (UX) and human-centered design (HCD) techniques used almost universally on websites apply equally to intranets.
This felt like a settled fact, so Iâm surprised to find myself asking the question: when did it cease to be a goal to deliver usable intranets?
The shift to modern intranet platforms has triggered this question, whether itâs SharePoint Modern or one of the many independent intranet solutions in the market. All too often, projects are skipping UX and HCD techniques, and jumping straight into the technical solution. If intranets are to deliver real value, these short-circuited approaches need to change.