Intranet Design

It is recommended that two different visual styles and two different sets of templates for the intranet and the external website but should comply with the company’s overall design language.

Differentiating Intranet Design from Internet Design
Intranet users are your employees and Internet users are your customers. Avoid internally focused designs for external websites. Provide links to explanations of any corporate language on the Intranet for any new employees.

Extranet Design
The extranet should emulate the style of the external website. Extranet users should be assured that their information is kept private and not exposed to the public.

Employee Productivity
Any improvement in usability for the intranet is a direct contribution to your company’s bottom line. Efficiency, memorability and error reduction are the most important usability attributes for intranet designs.

Intranet Portals
The intranet should be seen as your company’s corporate information infrastructure, which supports many real job functions and aids communication between departments. Every employee should have a personal intranet homepage with links to their work department and links to project pages, which involved them. Every project should also have a home page with links to home pages of the people working on it. The project pages should also have links to any project plans and reports.

Directory, Search and News
Intranet portal home pages should have three components
1. A directory hierarchy that structures all content on the intranet.
2. Search field connecting to a search engine that indexes all pages on the intranet.
3. Current news about the company and employee interests.

Intranet Design Standards
Consistency is essential for intranet usability. The structure and presentation of the navigational system is also important. Every page should have an intranet logo, which is a link to the main intranet home page and a search button.

Guidelines for Standards
An interface design standard must
· Provide lots of examples as designers follow the examples more than the body text.
· Ensure that all examples comply with the standards in every way.
· Provide checklists
· Have a standards expert
· Be supported by an active evangelism program. Look for any new projects and inform them of the standards
· Be a live document, which is regularly updated.
· Be supported by templates and development tools.
· Have a good index and search facility.

Browser Defaults
Allow users to change the preference settings from the ones you provide to meet their individual needs but do provide a good set of default settings. The following default settings should be set:
· Default home page should be your intranet home page.
· Remove all links, bookmarks, buttons etc provided by the browser vendor.
· The browser’s email preference should be set up to use the email program supported by your own IT department.
· The default search button should be set to a single search service.

Search Engine Defaults
To select a good search engine, select 5 or so problems that are typical for people in your industry and phrase short queries for each problem. Enter these into the leading search engines and inspect the top 10 retrieved links. Give a rating for each of these links and the sum of these 10 ratings for the 5 problems will lead you to select a good search engine.
Four other attributes also need to be accessed:

1. How many seconds it takes from typing in the search engine URL until the first page has finished downloading
2. Prominence of the search type-in field on the search page.
3. How many seconds it takes from clicking the search button until the search result page has finished loading.
4. Predictive value of the search results listing.

Give 50% weight to search quality, 10% weights each to download time, search response time and search field prominence and 20% weight for the predictive value of the search results listing.

Intranet User Testing
Test users will be your employees and not your customers. Include new employees to assist with navigation and home page design. Usability can be tested in the lab or in the field.