What is an Intranet?
An intranet portal is an internal communication tool that allows employees within an organization to share secure company information and tools that ultimately help in their day to day job activities. When designing an intranet, it’s important to address general company wide information that is relevant to all employees but also provide a way for employees to quickly access information that is specific to their job function.
Over the years, many intranets become cumbersome junkyards of information, making use and maintenance difficult. As a result, individual departments take it upon themselves to develop and customize their own segment of the intranet, which can lead to inconsistencies in content and navigation.
Who are the stakeholders?
When designing an intranet, it’s important to get support from key business units, as well as executive management. If senior management understands how a good intranet can benefit their specific departments, they can serve as an advocate for the intranet and galvanize excitement internally in their own departments.
Understanding the users
In any web development project, it’s important to consult a representative sample of users to understand how users interact with the intranet. This can take the form of informal user interviews in order to understand internal communications. Good questions to ask in these interviews are:
- What common tasks do employees use the intranet for?
- What tools and resources should be surfaced to the forefront and made globally accessible?
- Are their commonalities and differences between departments?
Intranet Structure & Design
A major challenge when designing an intranet is coming up with a fast and easy way for users to navigate through a great deal of content. Users know what they are looking for when they go to their intranet and they want to quickly access that information. Users should be able to find their information in just a few clicks.
One option is to structure the intranet by departments and enforce the use of only one template to bring consistency across departments. In talking to stakeholders, you may find out that different departments have common communication and resource needs. Examples of a common intranet goal would be a way to communicate timely department news or access to a repository of department specific documents and applications.