Intranet design and content standards

Beyond this, to implement these plans, you need governance. How your intranet will work must be thought through. There should be content standards that explain how content should be added and maintained. There needs to be a process to cover new starters and their onboarding to the intranet. There should also be ‘look and feel’ rules that cover which widgets, colours and images should be used. Will your intranet pages look the same? Do you have a corporate style for documents? Will there be a standard ‘work’ photo for everyone’s profile, or can people add their own? Will having a well-populated profile page be a requirement that people are appraised on?

Content authors training, style and content guidelines.

Every quarter send a quick survey asking your users for three things your intranet should START DOING and three things your intranet should STOP DOING. Make it simple. When you get the results, share the data and insights with the company. Learn from it. And do something about it.

Information Architecture

The information architecture for the intranet captures the three main pillars of intranet content: Organizational Information, Functional Information, and Social Information.

Mega-Menus
These have been around for a while, but most organizations with whom I speak have not looked at these. The idea is this - rather than have so many top-level navigation items, try adding a few action-oriented menu items, with many options for drill-down.

Task-Oriented Grouping
Most of you reading this likely have an intranet that is organized by department and follows the org chart nearly verbatim. This is an "old way" of thinking, because if we're honest, how many of you come to work to "work with HR" or "work with Engineering?" We come to work to do tasks - to get work done - so ditch the org chart and start thinking about the task rather than the department. Another reason why this strategy works is because new employees almost never know what every department does. So organizing by department can be confusing for new employees as well. Oh yeah, and what about age-old problem of "Where does that live…HR, IT, Legal?" This often minimizes or eliminates these issues. But be careful, sometimes org structure is all that your users know, so there may be change management issues with the task-oriented approach.

Action-Oriented Labels
This tactic relates more to links that are on pages, rather than navigation items, but we have seen behavior change when the language used on links is changed to be more action-oriented.

Promote Top Areas
Every intranet platform today has the ability to promote popular links or areas, yet many never leverage this functionality. The truth is, it's popular for a reason, so surface that information for others to see.

Under the current structure, this information is organized as follows:

• UNEP Category: Information relating to the structure UNEP as an organisation, including the people, divisions and offices, and other content of that nature is a stand-alone categorisation.
• ESSENTIALS Category: Information relating to the strategies, processes, and work-outcomes of the organisation, including strategies, policies, processes, templates, and other information of that nature is a stand-alone categorisation.

Content Standards

Bite-Sized Delivery - Your content should be delivered in a bite > snack > meal fashion. In other words, first give the user a bite (a simple link), then a snack (maybe a mega menu or additional options), then the meal (the entire page or content). See the example here of the White House site, where "Issues" is the bite, the list of top issues is the snack, and any one of the issues is the meal (where the "meat" is).

ROT stands for Redundant, Outdated, Trivial, and is a great way to classify your content. ROT is just what it sounds like, digital noise that almost always prohibits effective knowledge discovery and often leads to massive user frustration. And at first glance, you may think that the largest "cost" of ROT is storing all of the content that is not adding value, but that's the least of your worries.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You try to find something in a specific location on your intranet, but you can't find it, so you use the intranet's global search, but you still can't find it. So after spending nearly an hour, you ultimately have to ask a colleague, who then emails it to you. BUT, rather than store this in the intranet where it should be, you save it locally 9or keep it in your email), so you can quickly find it next time without the heartburn. Anyone? A lot of things have happened here. From user frustration, to low adoption, to circumventing the systems (storing artifacts locally so you no longer have to search for it), to restricting collaboration and knowledge sharing. And so it goes with ROT. It can cause a lot of grief. Start by identifying what the R, O, and T are in your organization. Our governance toolkit includes guidance, scripts and templates for helping you to identify ROT within your organization.

Put people and culture at the heart of your intranet. Put photo gallery at the bottom of the home page, people will scroll down to see people-centric content.

Leadership has to model the behaviour they want to see on the intranet.

Move or create leadership blogs on your intranet. It’ll encourage people to interact, and your employees are always interested in getting insight into leadership’s perspectives and personalities. One pro tip: keep the content human.

Build your intranet based on your organizations’ goals and needs, not on what you think other organizations are doing. Intranets may seem generic, but a good intranet takes into consideration your industry and its specific challenges.

Have your leadership team and executives commit to using the tool. Town halls and key initiatives are great ways for leadership to exercise the tool in visible ways.

The homepage is the front page of the intranet and is found at intranet.latrobe.edu.au.b.Sub-site: A sub-site is a collection of web pages that make up a subsidiary site of the intranet i.e. a college,c.function business unit sub-site.Site owner: This is the person responsible for the content and quality of the sub-site. The site owner (usually thed.College Provost or head of department or functional head) may delegate intranet content and developmenttasks to a nominated representative (the site editor or section manager).Site section manager or editor: This is the person who updates and maintains a web page or collection of pages,e.as specified in the webpage footer of that site.Section 6 - StakeholdersResponsibility for implementation – The following UNEP staff have been delegated with intranet responsibilities:Vice-Chancellor; Senior Executive Group; Chief Marketing Officer; Manager, Internal Communications;Section managers, editors and content owners.Responsibility for monitoring implementation and compliance – Internal Communications will be responsible forreviewing this policy and related guidelines and procedures, monitoring implementation and compliance, and highlevel decision making relating to the design and content of the intranet, including top level information architecture.

Design Standards

Attention Span - Keep pages clean and simple, not busy. A new employee should be able to visit any page on your intranet and know exactly where to click or go next within 2-3 seconds.

Consistency Is Key – Nothing drives users crazy like inconsistency, and this includes inconsistency in design, layout, navigation, terminology, etc. Familiarity breeds findability.

(a) Home Page: The design of the home page is managed and determined by the governing body of the intranet. Every intranet that wants to have high adoption rates needs to create homepages where the content changes frequently (ideally, daily or even more frequently if it can be managed.) It should show information that is not only relevant to topics being discussed across the company, but it also tailored to the individual. The intranet homepage is the most hotly-contested real estate on the site, with every business area hoping to have a direct link to their information. Every intranet team should have a simple policy outlining what does (and more importantly, doesn’t) get published to the home page.

(b) Category Menus: The design of the category menus is managed and determined by the governing body of the intranet.

(c) Division / Office / Regional Office Spaces: The design of the division

(d) Embedding Electronic Processes: Processes should be embedded in the intranet. This will transform it into a place of productivity.

Homepage components and purpose

Content page layout and components

Logo and toolbar

Search and how it works

Main menu structure and purpose

Sub menu structure, purpose and editing

Footer

Use of colours and fonts

Site security including levels that have been applied to various sections

Applications

Best Practices