Last year, the intranet at American Electric Power (AEP) was recognized by the Nielsen Norman Group as one of the top 10 in the world. In a case study in the latest issue of Strategic Communication Management, William Amurgis, AEP’s manager of intranet strategy, outlines why it's such a success.

A key factor, says Amurgis, is the robust approach taken to testing and researching new designs and developments. He summarizes the three-phase process as follows:

1. Research
In this phase, we become one with our audience members, discovering their aspirations, feeling their pain and figuring out how best to serve them. We've noticed that their expectations are increasingly driven by their use of consumer technology and the public websites they frequent, which challenges us to make sure our intranet is state-of-the-art.

2. Design
We produce a multitude of sketches, prototypes and rough style guides leading up to a final design.

3. Evaluation
No design goes untested. We conduct usability evaluations, focus groups and expert reviews to hone in on a usable design.

This iterative process, continues Amurgis, offers two key benefits:

1. Flexibility
Different projects have different requirements. Some are longer than others, need more attention than others and demand more rigor than others. As an iterative process, an effort can begin at any phase and cycle around as often as necessary.

2. Experimentation
An iterative process naturally lends itself to experimentation. There's no pressure to make sure that the first draft of the design is the absolute best or solves all of the problems. We're free to experiment with different designs knowing that we'll have more time to perform research, test and try it again.

Within our process, a comprehensive site redesign may begin with audience research, which leads to a design prototype, which fails upon evaluation, which requires more research, then another prototype, then more evaluation, and so on. Each successive cycle gets us closer to the target.

The full case study is published in the latest issue of Strategic Communication Management.

And if reinvigorating the company intranet is a challenge you currently face, you can hear Melcrum's webinar playback on how to Redesign your intranet for a more successful communication platform – for free – by joining the Internal Comms Hub in June.

See you next week!

P.S. If you have plans to develop your company intranet to play a major role in connecting employees, don't miss the Intranet 2.0 Forum in London this month.

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The Source for Communicators is a free resource for corporate communicators from Melcrum Publishing.
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