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Keeping up with the Jones - the latest trends in intranet design
When we are engaged to work on an intranet project, we are often asked what other law firms are doing with their sites as a starting point for ideas for development. However, law firm intranets can benefit from looking at what is going on outside of the legal ctor. Intranets within large corporate organisations are often a lot further ahead in terms of innovation and how they are being utilid. For example, we are eing the term “digital workplace”, rather than intranet, being ud to describe the internal platform which is ud to surface up information and systems to support workers in their day-
to-day tasks.
This article aims to provide a summary of some recent trends in intranet design, how they can relate to law firm intranets and an approach to intranet projects and delivery.
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The Nielson Norman Group (NNG) recently published its Intranet Design Annual for 2015. The Annual provides, together with a list of the 10 award-winning intranets for 2015, a list of the trends they are eing in intranet design. Both the Annual and the awards are bad on entries received by the NNG from all around the globe, from organisations of all sizes (the smallest award winner this year being a company comprising of 200 employees and the largest of 230,000) and all ctors (from social housing offices to a multi-national telecommunications company).
∙Iterative changes rather than big bang
Agile or Agile-like approaches are becoming more common place in intranet development. Instead of organisations waiting to re-launch sites with full scale redesign, they are launching specific features gradually over a period of time. The NNG does acknowledge, however, that a drip-feed of changes may be as disruptive to the ur as one big-bang approach so all changes should be managed and communicated effectively.
∙Mobile delivery
Mobile delivery of intranets in large corporates is often streets ahead of what law firms are doing. It has been a must for them to meet the needs of different types of urs. Law firm urs are historical
ly desk-bad, whereas if you think of an organisation such as BT, it will have a cross ction of urs which include office workers, call centre operatives, field workers and engineers. All of the people will need to know what’s going on around the business and be able to access the tools they need to do their job, although they are unlikely to be sat at a desk all day in order to do this.
Another example is Barclays Bank, which introduced a mobile intranet aimed at staff in retail branches who did not even have a work email account. The new site, MyZone, provided them with an intranet environment accessible from their own smartphone or tablet. It included links to HR process, a video
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channel, product information and more, and gave Barclays a 22 per cent increa in employee engagement within branches in the six months which followed the site’s launch.
Whilst law firms have not tended to have the issues to deal with, there is a distinct change in working patterns. Many people absorb information constantly via smart phones and tablets in their p
sulaymanersonal lives and are now beginning to expect this in a work context.
∙“Hover over” information for improved arch results delivery
The best designs focus on getting the right information to the right people with less ur effort. Search results making u of “hover over” effects to display more information to the ur before they decide to click through to open an item is a great move forward in achieving this.
We regularly hear feedback from urs that they get frustrated with the speed an intranet arch result, say a document, takes to open up (often becau it is going to retrieve content from a different databa or system), and, that even when they open it, the ur finds it is not what they were looking for. The “hover over” gets around this frustration and saves the ur time. An alternative here could be a preview tool which would give the ur an idea of the content before launching an application, such as Word.
∙Carouls
Carouls are not a new feature on intranet homepages, but they esntially attempt to make better u of limited space by providing a placeholder to display different pieces of content (generally news)
on rotation. There is still the challenge of deciding what content is relevant and important enough (and indeed who makes the decisions) to dis play on the caroul however…
∙Flat Design
Gone are the days of frames, shadows and beveled graphics – the award-winning intranets all have flat designs, moving away from 3D buttons to straight-forward actionable icons.
A common gripe we often hear about intranets is around poor speed (performance). There can be many reasons for this. However a flatter design will inevitably make the page quicker to render, and will be especially relevant when thinking about mobile delivery.
∙Company performance on homepage
Some of the award winners display updates about company performance, share prices and results as a way of engaging with their employees and keeping them updated.
We are not eing a huge trend towards this in legal but rather bespoke matter or client pages that, subject to the right curity and controls, enable partners or client teams to e the status of the latest matters, bills, WIP etc.
Some firms do however also publici figures showing achievement of billing targets, Pro Bono work or other initiatives as a way of engaging and motivating employees.
∙U of video
U of video on intranets is on the up. It can be ud for a variety of purpos from training to communicating news stories, knowledge sharing and internal marketing. With the surge of YouTube, urs are more accepting of less than professional quality video content being the norm, and don’t expect a polished corporate communications style product at all times.
Amongst the NNG award winners, Klick, a digital health agency in Canada, offered knowledge sharing using simple to create iPhone videos . You don’t need to have experienced audio visual teams in place to be able to achieve this.
∙External consultants
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Eight of the ten award winning intranets in the NNG report had help from external agencies and consultants on their projects. External consultants can bring experti in particular areas and also ideas and examples of what works well and best practice from other organisations. The winning intranets ud outside resource in areas such as ur experience rearch, content strategy, information architecture and integration with third-party tools.
∙Faceted arch
gmenting
Eight of the ten award-winning intranets in the NNG report provided urs with ways to refine their arch results, for example by using filters.
Law firms who have invested in enterpri arch technology will probably have been using faceted arch to enable their urs to filter through various content sources. This approach relies on consistent metadata being applied to the underlying content.
∙Federated arch
NNG has en an increa in organisations offering arch capabilities that interrogate multiple repositories to offer a “one arch” experience, with the overall aim of saving the ur time.
Federated arch is not a new thing within legal. There are established products on the market which provide a federated arch solution by connecting to key resources (in particular to legal resources such as Lexis and Westlaw) from just one arch. The key thing to note here is that federated arch is only as good as the arch on the underlying databa. If you federate to a databa with a poor arch engine, you will get the same poor results and may expo the inadequacies of its arch even more when the results are shown alongside tho from other databas.
Megamenus and Fat Footers
Both Megamenus and Fat Footers are tools which surface content and links which may otherwi be buried under an intranet’s layered architecture. Megamenus allow urs to e more content by hovering the mou over the top level navigation. Fat Footers, displayed at the bottom of intranet pages and parated out from the main content areas, tend to repeat links and headings ud elwhere by way of a reminder to urs.
Making it happen
It can be difficult to get nior level buy-in for large scale inward facing initiatives, such as intranet development, where the return on investment is hard to measure. Intranet projects often suffer from scope creep and take longer to deliver than they should, with the teams responsible tied-up for months on end. In addition, the are such central systems that ownership of the project and decision making can be hard to nail down.
英语翻译器拍照翻译扫一扫If you have a site which is up and running, and esntially “not broke”, an alternative approach is to look at developing specific apps or tools which can be added to the intranet or integrated alongside. This can often be a quick win and shows the firm how the site can be evolved by providing it with tools which will really add value, rather than primarily aesthetic redesigns.
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For example, using the intranet to automate a simple paper-bad form or to surface data (maybe relating to clients and matters) which is hidden away in other systems can make a real difference and save time for urs on day-to-day tasks.
Interestingly, although the NNG report does focus on design rather than features or functionality, there is no mention of a trend for collaboration amongst the award winning sites. Is this becau the
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word is no longer on trend? Or are we now coming to the conclusion that collaboration is happening naturally around organisations and that we don’t have to focus on the software needed to enable this. Asssing the culture of the organisation, identifying the business need and the pockets of urs within firms where collaboration would really break down barriers, improve communication and overall efficiency may be the keys to success here.
Intranets still have a long way to go to move from news and information portals which push out information to interactive sites without which urs can’t do their jobs, but there are plenty of opportunities and ideas out there in inspire this to happen.
Sally Roberts, 3Kites Consulting, January 2015
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3Kites Consulting is a limited company registered in England and Wales. Registered number: 5644909. Registered office: Chancery Hou, 30 St John’s Road, Woking, Surrey, GU21 7SA.
