Date post: | 16-Jul-2015 |
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Design |
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Techniques to build, engage and manage your intranet project
Rebecca Jackson
Social Media Manager, Melbourne Water
@_rebeccajackson #intranetsaus
The bit about me
• Social Media Manager at Melbourne Water
• Business lead for the Intranet Redevelopment
• Soon to be Community Engagement Manager at Seamless CMS
• Sometime sketcher
• Find me on:
– Twitter: @_rebeccajackson
– Blog: rebeccajacksonblogs.wordpress.com
– www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccajljackson
The bit about you
• Name
• Role
• Company
• Why you signed up for this workshop
Agenda
• Why bother with engagement
• How can you engage your organisation
• In depth and activities
– Stakeholders and business representatives
– Personas
– Information Architecture
• Resources
Why bother with engagement
It’s their intranet
Supports a solid business case
Early buy-in leads to project success
Different perspectives
Beppie CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr
Discussion
• What engagement blockers are there in your organisation?
How you can engage your organisation
Requirements gathering
• It’s their intranet, you need to know what they NEED
• Builds initial awareness about the project
• Do it through
– Focus groups
– Surveys
– Interviews
Business Representative Group
• Representation from across the business
• Keep updated about the project
• Input into key project tasks
• Quick access to what the business needs
We’ll look at this one in more detail later
Personas
• Represent your typical intranet users
• Basis for design decisions
• Quick reference to user perspective
• Tool when talking to project stakeholders
We’ll look at this one in more detail later
Show and tell sessions
• Take every opportunity to talk about the project
• Show designs and progress
• Don’t be afraid about feedback
Information Architecture
• Based on clear principles
• Users do the work
– Card sorting
– Tree testing
We’ll look at this one in more detail later
Usability testing
• Users follow scenarios
• Issues are recorded
• Where practical, worked into development or the upgrade path
User acceptance testing
• Project team follows formal scripts
• Users do ‘exploratory testing’
• They become familiar with the system
• Find issues that scripts don’t
Stakeholders
Why do you need your stakeholders?
• Stakeholders can help when you need someone with ‘pull’
• When you need help with tasks, they are already engaged
• Change management is easier with more people across it
• Keeps the project ‘honest’ and close to user needs
Who are they?
• Sponsor
• Project leadership team
• Project team
• Business Representative Group
• Business Champions
• Content Owners and Authors
• Users
Business Representative Group
More regular and intensive involvement in broader project
tasks.
Business Champions
Less regular involvement in more specific tasks to understand business needs and test the new
intranet.
Content SMEs and Authors
Targeted involvement to learn how to write content, use the publishing tool and in the ongoing maintenance of content.
Business stakeholders structure
Example project structure
Sponsor
Project Leadership Team
Project Manager Business Lead
Business reps
Business Representative Group
Business champions
Authors / SMEs
Project streams
Design Technology
Change / comms Governance
Content
IT Lead
How to choose your business reps
• Organisational structure
• Business function
• Content area
• Volunteer (or Voluntold)
Activity
1. Who are your key stakeholders
2. Choose your business representatives:
– Select an approach (or combination)
– Note who you would like to involve or what teams/business units
3. How will you approach your business reps?
Personas
Why Personas?
• Understand user needs
• Make usability a focus
• Deliver on needs, not wants
• Prioritise design decisions
• Reduce testing expense
• Change management
• DIY vs consultant
Process
• Research
• Interview
• Analyse
• Report
Research
• Use existing data if available
– HR System
– Prior research
– Information from other projects
• Workshop with a selection of staff
Interview
• 15 users is a good, manageable number
• Cover a range of demographics
– i.e. age, location, tenure, job level
• Questions
– Demographic
– Seek to find pain points
– Learn top tasks
• Observation at the interviewees desk
Analyse
• Review data
• Look for themes
• Pick out great quotes
• Group themes to build personas
• Use data to build profiles
Report
• Aim for 6-8 personas
• Choose your level of detail
• Give personas names
• Select images
– Stock vs staff
• Consider audience and format
Personas
Natalie the
New Starter
Anita the
Author
Karen the
Knowledge Worker
Peter the
People Manager
Austin
the Operator
http://www.christinanghiem.com/corbis-personas.html
http://www.userinsight.com/personas-done-right-way/
https://ebiinterfaces.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/personas-for-the-ebi-resdesign/
Activity
1. As individuals, write down 3 or more questions you could ask during a persona interview.
The aim being to understand:
– About them
– Their job
– How they use the intranet
Information architecture
Why Information Architecture?
• Supports findability of your content
• If you’re starting from scratch, you need a structure
• If you’re rebuilding, you need to know if it’s working
Approaches
• Top-down
• Bottom-up
• Hybrid
Process
• Understand existing content (content inventory)
• Find out what content needs there are (through interviews)
• Optional: look at similar organisations, what do they do?
• Create principles – the rules of the IA
• Set up activities to structure content (card-sorting)
• Test the structure (tree-testing)
• Settle on a structure
• Continuously improve
IA Principles
• Before you start creating your structure, it helps to have rules to guide it
• When creating the structure, it guides decisions
• Once the structure is ‘set’ it guides any changes
Where does the IA come from
• Existing intranet (content inventory)
• Other systems
Activity
• As a group let’s create some rules for our information architecture
Example of some IA principles
• Doesn’t need to reflect old structure• Content should have one home• Not reflective of the organisational structure• Must make sense to new starters• Names should avoid group/team names where practical• No repetitive suffixes or prefixes (i.e. my… or our… or your…)• Top level fixed• Designed for flexibility at the lower levels• Top level, not too many, not too few (5-8)
Card sorting
• A technique used to sort and categorise information
• Informs heading titles
• Gives structure to the information
• Prioritises information
Open vs closed
• Open: users sort cards and create their own category headings
• Closed: you define the category headings and users sort into those
Tree testing
• A method to validate and challenge an information architecture
• Valuable to do after card-sorting
The basics:
• Create scenarios for a user to find information on the intranet
• Based on the scenario, users should try to find content unguided
• Use results to update the IA if needed
Online vs Offline
Online
• Easy to run and set up
• Sometimes requires a license for a tool
• Quicker to analyse results
• Can include more people
• Less bias
Offline
• Takes time to set up and coordinate
• More hands on
• Limits the number of people
• Can observe decision making
Activity
• Mock card-sorting session
Articles
Personas• rebeccajacksonblogs.wordpress.com/2013/09/19/diy-intranet-
personas• www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_personas• www.uxforthemasses.com/personasCard sorting• http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/cardsorting• http://boxesandarrows.com/card-sorting-a-definitive-guideTree testing• http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_treetesting
Further reading
• A practical guide to Information Architecture – Donna Spencer http://maadmob.com.au/training/books/practical-ia
• Designing intranets: creating sites that work – James Robertson http://store.steptwo.com.au/product/designing-intranets/
Thank you participating
• Twitter: @_rebeccajackson
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccajljackson
• Blog: rebeccajacksonblogs.wordpress.com