One of the great advantages of working on an intranet or on an internal system, as opposed to a public-facing design, is that your users are all around you every day. This means that incorporating user research into a design can be easier as no elaborate recruiting is required — you can simply talk to colleagues, visit other departments, or travel to other offices.
We always recommend involving users in research, early and often, to improve designs. For intranet teams, involving users early can ease adoption when a new design launches.
Manage Change
Even when a new, usable design replaces a previous, terrible design, users may not be excited for the change. However bad the previous design was, people knew how it worked (and how it didn’t work). A new design is an unknown, and, even when it is an improvement over previous designs, requires time to learn.
Some intranet teams develop new sites on their own, with little or no employee input. The flipside of this approach is that the employees, the ones who will need to use the new site, tool or system, have little to no idea that a new design is coming soon. They’ll be sure to complain when a familiar design is suddenly replaced by an unfamiliar one.
Change management is essential for launches of new or redesigned internal sites or tools. Informing employees about coming changes goes a long way to easing acceptance of new designs. Preparing users can be as simple as sharing early wireframes or previews of the new designs or keeping them up to date with intranet team’s progress. Even getting people familiar with the idea of change makes them less resistant to it.
Increase Interest
Why not go a step further? Go beyond informing users, and start including them. Including users in the development process gives them more interest in the new design.
Involve stakeholders and users in the generation of feature or design ideas, or invite them to participate in user research. Those stakeholders and users can then inform, and potentially excite, their groups about the coming design changes. An employee who participated in an early-needs analysis, who completed a card-sorting exercise to help define the site structure, who completed usability testing and saw changes as a result of feedback, or who was part of a beta launch of a design is more invested in the design, and more aware of the design’s genesis. Rather than throwing a new design at users and then wondering why they’re resistant, include users in the process and show them how the design came about.
Create Content
Another benefit of involving users early? Populating content. Many sites integrate social tools, ranging from commenting on news to microblogging to posting stories. When such tools launch, adoption can be slow, particularly if employees are not accustomed to using such tools in a workplace setting.
One of the key recommendations to introducing social tools on a site is to make the purpose of the tool clear . What better way to do so than to launch with content already in the tool and with contributors on board to continue adding content?
Consider a beta launch of the tool to a subset of users. As those employees use the tool and provide feedback on it, you benefit from both being able to tweak the design and launch with live content. An added plus to this approach: users who aren’t in the beta release may see a colleague using the tool. Piquing users’ curiosity about new features can ultimately drive usage. They want it, because they don’t have it.
If a beta launch isn’t possible, actively enlist the help of specific employees throughout the organization to be active on the site at first launch. Find colleagues who are willing to post a comment, add a detail to a profile, or answer a coworker’s question and encourage them to do so for the first month or two. Don’t rely solely on the intranet team for help: they’ll be busy after launch and will likely have little time to help populate content.
Support Usage
At the end of a user-centered development process, anywhere from 1 to 1,000 employees may have provided feedback, participated in research, created content, or simply seen early iterations of designs. Those who have provided feedback and feel part of the project may be happy to be advocates for the site. Pay attention to the employees who seem most interested in the design project, and keep in touch with them. As the launch approaches, ask these informed, involved employees to encourage colleagues to use the new site, tool, or feature, or to even help answer questions about the new site.
Plan for User Involvement
Ideally, every intranet would be designed with a user-focused process. That process benefits the site, the organization, the team, and the users. User adoption is a potential happy side effect of this user involvement. Through our years of reviewing and rating intranets for the Intranet Design Annual, we see example after example of improved design stemming from user research and improved adoption stemming from user involvement.
