1. Techniques to build, engage and
manage your intranet project
Rebecca Jackson
Social Media Manager, Melbourne Water
@_rebeccajackson #intranetsaus

2. 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

3. The bit about you
• Name
• Role
• Company
• Why you signed up for this workshop

4. Agenda
• Why bother with engagement
• How can you engage your organisation
• In depth and activities
– Stakeholders and business representatives
– Personas
– Information Architecture
• Resources

5. Why bother with engagement

6. It’s their intranet

7. Supports a solid business case

8. Early buy-in leads to project success

9. Different perspectives
Beppie CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr

10. Discussion
• What engagement blockers are there in your organisation?

11. How you can engage your organisation

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. Show and tell sessions
• Take every opportunity to talk
about the project
• Show designs and progress
• Don’t be afraid about feedback

16. Information Architecture
• Based on clear principles
• Users do the work
– Card sorting
– Tree testing
We’ll look at this one in more detail later

17. Usability testing
• Users follow scenarios
• Issues are recorded
• Where practical, worked
into development or the
upgrade path

18. User acceptance testing
• Project team follows formal
scripts
• Users do ‘exploratory testing’
• They become familiar with the
system
• Find issues that scripts don’t

19. Stakeholders

20. 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

21. Who are they?
• Sponsor
• Project leadership team
• Project team
• Business Representative Group
• Business Champions
• Content Owners and Authors
• Users

22. 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

23. 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

24. How to choose your business reps
• Organisational structure
• Business function
• Content area
• Volunteer (or Voluntold)

25. 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?

26. Personas

27. 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

28. Process
• Research
• Interview
• Analyse
• Report

29. Research
• Use existing data if available
– HR System
– Prior research
– Information from other projects
• Workshop with a selection of staff

30. 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

31. Analyse
• Review data
• Look for themes
• Pick out great quotes
• Group themes to build personas
• Use data to build profiles

32. Report
• Aim for 6-8 personas
• Choose your level of detail
• Give personas names
• Select images
– Stock vs staff
• Consider audience and format

33. Personas
Natalie the
New Starter
Anita the
Author
Karen the
Knowledge Worker
Peter the
People Manager
Austin
the Operator

35. http://www.christinanghiem.com/corbis-personas.html

36. http://www.userinsight.com/personas-done-right-way/

37. https://ebiinterfaces.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/personas-for-the-ebi-resdesign/

38. 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

39. Information architecture

40. 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

41. Approaches
• Top-down
• Bottom-up
• Hybrid

42. 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

43. 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

44. Where does the IA come from
• Existing intranet (content inventory)
• Other systems

45. Activity
• As a group let’s create some rules for our information
architecture

46. 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)

47. Card sorting
• A technique used to sort and categorise information
• Informs heading titles
• Gives structure to the information
• Prioritises information

48. Open vs closed
• Open: users sort cards and create their own category headings
• Closed: you define the category headings and users sort into
those

49. 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

50. 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

51. Activity
• Mock card-sorting session

52. Articles
Personas
• rebeccajacksonblogs.wordpress.com/2013/09/19/diy-intranet-
personas
• www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_personas
• www.uxforthemasses.com/personas
Card sorting
• http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/cardsorting
• http://boxesandarrows.com/card-sorting-a-definitive-guide
Tree testing
• http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_treetesting

53. 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/

54. Thank you participating
• Twitter: @_rebeccajackson
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccajljackson
• Blog: rebeccajacksonblogs.wordpress.com