Designing for ALL of your users, without asking them all??

Having many hats within an IT team can have its advantages (and obviously its downsides!), but when facing the task of designing new visual interfaces for some 17,000 users, what are the vitals for a successful page layout and how do we cater for everyone?

Currently we have 18 visual interfaces across some two Intranets & nine Extranets, all of which are viewed by virtually the whole of our business. So how is it possible to incorporate all of the features for all of our users? It’s simply not an option. BUT, with good research and some carefully placed demonstrations and trials, we found that it is possible to capture user’s most important features.

As our business is driven by news, safety and corporate information, it is essential that we make available the information that the business needs as soon as they log on. On the flip side, cascading a lot of information as soon as a user logs in can be overwhelming which lead onto another key driver for our new interfaces – a users navigation when logged onto the system. Time and time again feedback appeared indicating that our Intranet was too “One way” – information was hard to put back into the system. Mentioning “News” above, we now have a “One-Click” route to adding news, which has been proven to increase the publication of delivering news on a day to day basis.

With these items in mind, and with the know-how of the Claromentis team, we switched to Java Searching – and boosted our search times to around 0.6 seconds. We simplified our menu structures to two levels and simplified our “People” pages to include an embedded left hand menu for easy navigation and making related pages easy to find.

So far, I think all I’ve alluded to is that our visual interfaces are the same as around 90% of corporate Intranets – BORING! So in response to this, we’ve added blocks of colour, symbolic icons for different applications, consistency in approach, JQuery powered gallery slideshow, easy application navigation from a JQuery powered application slider, and the easiest item for finding what’s mine – “My Desk”.

My advice for anyone designing a new visual interface for a large number of users is a four-step process. Keys to success are brainstorming, research, demonstrate and trial. Keeping users informed of change is always a key to success as they are the stakeholders in the use and growth of your Intranet. The Claromentis team were fundamental in providing accurate mock-ups and advice from other customers, a position that I hope we’ll all be in shortly to enable us to all share our ideas and findings.

One closing thought to a semi-inspiring blog, a couple of links to screen shots of our intranet homepage – to prove we’re moving forward with our Intranet.

“Dimensions” of Old à “Dimensions” Today

All comments welcome as usual,

Craig

Intranet-Extranet