“How long is a piece of string?” traditional riddle.

I cut my digital teeth on intranets and have worked on the little darlings for some well known brands – Rolls-Royce, B2B telecoms giant MCI WorldCom (or whatever they are this year) and The Economist to namedrop a few. The consistent factor is that they’re all different.

At an intranet conference (they’re as exciting as they sound), Australian intranet consultant James Robertson made a simple, but vital point – before you can design or redesign your intranet you need to know what it’s supposed to do. Following this logic means that before you try to measure how well your intranet is doing, you need to know what it’s supposed to be succeeding at: No good judging sprint times at a fly-fishing contest.

Remember, an intranet is just another business tool: It’s there to increase profit. Nothing more nothing less; it’s just that it can do it in some interesting ways through efficiency and engagement.

Paul Miller, MD and proprietor of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum once described an intranet as “the backbone of the company’s information systems” and he’s right, it’s where employees should start to find any online internal system instead of rummaging for shortcuts, links, passwords for a multitude of unconnected services.

I was once told by a client that they “had no intranet”. Odd … I’d have expected them to at least have a bad one. Guess what? I stopped counting at 22 intranet mini sites. My task was to work out what the intranet should ‘do’, so I could kill the weeds and create a garden befitting the organisation.

I gave this organisation the ‘comms platform’ they requested. But I also did the user-centred design and backed it up with answering the daily tasks their employees were desperate to do online. Not necessarily sexy (walk first, run later), but it meant they could do their jobs faster and more effectively: Finding someone in the organisation, search for a particular form, contact the IT help desk, post internal vacancies. If you can do the day-to-day stuff all the fancy-pants malarkey is the icing on the cake.

The intranet as a supermarket

Business thinks: Supply chains, human resources, visual merchandising, health and safety, stock rooms, marketing/advertising, facilities, customer parking, staff parking … ad nauseam.

Customer thinks: Where are the beans, I’m in a hurry?

There are plenty of technical solutions, social tools and all the other fairground attractions, but leave this until later. Fit the IT to the requirement, not the other way round. Many’s the time I’ve been brought into a project where the emphasis is all about IT:

Org : “We’re getting SharePoint!”
Long Dog: “Cool, what are you going to do with it?”
Org: “We haven’t decided yet, but we’re working all round the clock to get it installed”
Long Dog: “Oh, ok. What does the information architecture look like? What do your editors and users say about it? How are you going to run the new intranet and who ‘owns’ it?”
Org: “We’re going to sort that all out after it goes live”
Long Dog: “Live? Live with what?”
Org: “We’re going to migrate everything from the old one to begin with. But we HAVE got SharePoint and some new templates.”
Long Dog: “It’s just the same old intranet with different colours, rounded corners and a budget binge in the hundreds of thousands, isn’t it?”
Org: “Um … yes.”

Summary

- Do your audience research and articulate a convincing story to your stakeholders
- Don’t worry about IT until you know what you’re going to create (horse BEFORE cart)
- Get professionals in when you need help at the right time – I have very reasonable rates – a little more time and money spent up front will save a lot more time and money in the future: Engage the architect BEFORE the builders begin

The Long Dog

“You can have it good, quick, cheap – pick any two”. Proverb.

A friend (who for the continued benefaction of his clients shall rename nameless) recently said:

“[Our clients] don’t really know much about marketing or usability – but they know what they like … and what they like usually bears no relation to anything sane or tasteful”.

When you’re designing a digital presence – internet / intranet / mobile / dTV, whatever – how can you be sure that you design will actually work? And when you’re sure, how can you convince the people you’re working for that your way is the best?

Will it work?
This is about understanding the business needs, then understanding the users’ needs and finding the best fit for both.

It sounds like stating the obvious, but so often websites are designed by committees, a.k.a. ‘steering groups’ (*shudder*), in organisations or “the focus group of one”. Both often have little web experience and little knowledge of the needs of web users – specifically their target audience of users.

Use research methods like stake holder interviews (in the business and with end users), card sorting exercises, personas and testing your ideas or designs. If you do your research, you should be able to present an iron-clad case for an approach that demonstrates meeting the business requirements in the best way the users want to interact with the organisation. That’s a clumsy sentence so let’s reduce it to one principle: UCD – User-Centred Design.

How can you convince people to do it your way?
The problem here is usually resources – money. There are two great, but simple benefits of UCD that can argue the case:

1 You actually achieve what you set out to do and maximise the potential of the work you’ve done
2 ‘Right first time’

Knocking together a site and “get it launched and then we can revisit it” is self deluding. Let’s face it, how many businesses really go back and change a site after it’s launched? And for good reason: The <insert grumpiest big cheese in the organisation> understands it’s costly to redesign because it’s like repeating the same project that’s only just been run.

If you can show, through your research and rigorous and iterative testing (from concepts to full usability testing with real punters on working prototypes) that your approach enables the users to do the things they want to do and the things the organisation wants them to do then the ‘client’ is left with a quandary: The further away from the UCD approach we go, the more money we might save in the short term, but the further we get away from meeting our objectives and the more money we’ll waste and lose in the long term.

So … summary:

- Understand the business requirements
- Understand the users’ / audience needs
- Design an approach that gives the best fit for both and articulate your thinking for the benefits of potentially tasteless or insane ‘clients’

Ok … can we have a nice picture of a smiling business person receiving lots of cash from a happy user please? Thanks.

The Long Dog.

…was what a friend said recently. A debate started about whether Twitter was a fabulous burgeoning social networking tool … or just another excuse to waste time instead of doing real work.

For the uninitiated, Twitter, describing itself as a microblogging tool (whatever that means), is an online social network, allowing Tweeple (yes … people who indulge) to post up 140 characters’ worth of news, questions, social trivia or just about anything that takes your fancy, as often as they like. Unlike Facebook you don’t need permission to ‘follow’ anyone’s updates, unless they’ve created a hidden profile which, to be honest, instantly makes Twitter a social eunuch and reasonably pointless – go back to Facebook! The more people you follow, the more updates you’ll see – you just have to remember to follow interesting people – friends, colleagues or celebs.

The updates (‘Tweets’) range from banal to more work-minded collaboration. A quick glance at the Tweets I’m following shows me these two:

“Ugh I just spilled water all over my chair – it was my bad thoughts about the salad place!!! ACK!”
“Social Media’s History And Trajectory – Notes From Danah Boyd (BoingBoing): http://bit.ly/eNwjr [We like Danah - alot]”

Like all online social networks, Twitter is only worth using if it’s useful. If it’s not – forget it and go and do something more productive instead. So – make it work for you, or leave it alone.

But. Like real life social networks, you get what you put in and you have to put in before others put out. When I asked the Twitter community what would you say to someone who says ‘I just don’t get Twitter’, one of the best answers was “You don’t have to … you’re not the target audience”.

Just because you’ve got a telephone doesn’t mean that lots of people will pick you out of the phone book to be their friend. If you want to get maximum value, mimic what you’d do at any networking event, or social situation:

1 – Associate with interesting people: ‘Follow’ as many interesting or potentially interesting people you can find , either by contacting them, or looking at your friends’ and colleagues’ feeds and seeing who looks good (you can always remove them later).

2 – Engage: Tweet to your heart’s content. Just remember that if you want to become one of those interesting people, pose questions, post links and yes … tell us about the personal stuff as well.

Ok, so why bother? Here are some of the reasons others have given:

- Building informal relationships with a global community, at great speed and zero expense
- Feedback on new products
- Following news as it happens and before the newsfeeds have had a chance to publish anything
- Access to high profile individuals (remember, you can follow ‘anyone’)
- “I get my news from BBC World’s Tweets, 24/7”
- Being contacted, without requesting, by the customer service department of a company, when someone was having real problems with a product (see “100 days of Twitter”)
- “It’s the water cooler, it’s the people you turn to, it’s the parish pump, it’s the pub, it’s the club, it’s just always there.”

Still need convincing? Ok – a couple of good articles on benefits and experience and the Twitter and links to the profiles of those who wrote them:

- “100 days of Twitter: The Twuth is out there” by Jennifer Frahm
- “Twitter Tips for Newbies” by Barbara Gibson (Chair of the International Association of Business Communicators)
- “Is Twitter the new list?” by Martin Malden, blogger and internet marketer
- “How Twitter’s spectacular growth is being driven by unexpected uses” video with Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams

Don’t forget to look me and my Tweets up on my profile.

… and thanks to @JM71 for inventing a word for those who don’t do Twitter … “Twuddites”

The Long Dog

“From chaos comes order” – Friedrich Nietzsche

An old friend and (now) colleague were discussing card sorting exercises and asked if I’d ever write something on the subject. Well, @harry_harrold (and other lovely readers) the DJ is indeed playing requests, so here you go…

For those unfamiliar, it’s a research technique similar to reorganising your music collection instead of doing your school revision. You might not know what you’re going to end up with but if you did you probably don’t need to run this sort of exercise. It’s easy, fun and great for engagement, collaboration and stimulating structured debate. They’re also stock in trade for user-centred design (UCD).

I use card sorts in situations where I’ve got a mess of as yet unrelated information that’s difficult to organise or identify relationships – organisation structures, website information architecture, prioritising and assigning work tasks. As always, this warrants greater description, but I’ll try a brief outline of the technique…

Equipment:
- ‘A mess of as yet unrelated information’ (pieces of web content, tasks, members of the animal kingdom etc)
- Cards. These can be A6 speaker’s prompt cards, Post-Its or anything else that’s small, numerous, inexpensive and easy to write on

That’s it. Maybe a pen to write on said cards, but that’s really all you need.

I’m going to deal with the solitary and group activities separately, but there’s one BIG rule for both approaches: Don’t try and make things fit an idea you’ve got in your head. This is what this exercise is about: discovering new and sensible ways of organising information.

Dancing on your own
Use a different card for each piece of information and don’t be shy about using a LOT of cards. Better to capture everything separately and get it right, than save a few coins on stationery. Scatter the cards onto a big table, put sticky notes on a wall or window, stand back and take a long look.

Where items seem to be related, start to put them into groups apart from the mass, but feel free to change mind and reorganise at any time. Using the idea classifying the animal kingdom, you might group dogs, cats and cows together as they all have four legs and fur/hair, but keep sharks separate even if they all have a head and tail at opposite ends.

Once you’ve enough items in a group, think of the common element that describes this group (e.g. mammals) and create a heading or “label” for that group. Ok – repeat until everything is either in a group or unquestionably on its own.

If groups get big or disproportionately bigger than other groups, you’ve probably lumped too much together and need get more granular with subgroups. You could create a new group for cows, lamas and antelopes (ungulates) and another for the dogs, cats and rabbits (pets).

Don’t expect to get it right on the first attempt. Go back and check. If it seems right, duplicate cards to fit in multiple areas, change labels to give the most understandable description, check for spurious or over sized groupings and check how the groupings relate to each other. You might want to rethink lumping dogs, cats and rabbits together as ‘pets’ and maybe split them into canidae, felidae and lagomorpha (betcha thought they were rodents, dintcha?). These subgroups fit neatly into the main group ‘mammals’.

Outputs
This way you end up with either distinctly separate groups, or a granular hierarchy of groups and subgroups (check out the graphic). The latter is often used for creating hierarchical nepohedral taxonomies for websites, better known as “sitemaps”.

Group therapy
Group card sorts are great for getting some real user-centred design going and on-the-job buy in from stakeholders as they see patterns and structures emerge and have an input in the process.

For some of the intranets I’ve designed I’ve started the research process by getting a dozen or so people from around the business, and at different levels, then given them five minutes to write down things they currently use the intranet for, their day-to-day daily work tasks (on or off the intranet) and what they’d like to see on a new intranet. This gives plenty to start off with and things written down by more than one person also begin to give significance to weighting the perceived importance of information.

The key thing is that you can then get the participants to make their own groupings. Make sure you watch and facilitate what’s going on and clarify any ambiguous cards so that the entire group is clear about what’s meant by everything. Provoke debate and conversation – “Can you tell us why you think it’s best this way?” and get them – the real live punters – to come up with subgroups and labelling for the groups, under your watchful eye of sensibleness.

Lastly, remember to capture things they way they happened: Photograph the output, copy the results into an electronic version (Visio, Excel etc) or if it’s small enough, physically pick it all up and heave it back to your desk.

There … order from chaos. Just don’t try and make things fit, instead discover relationships and new ways of organising.

Questions?

Oh … and I *might* have made up the term “hierarchical nepohedral taxonomies”.

The Long Dog