Melcrum's Social Media Newsletter

March 3rd, 2008 How to blog your way to a world-class intranet

Welcome to Melcrum's Social Media Newsletter.

We've heard before about adding social and collaborative tools to the intranet. Before you get that far, however, your site has to be worth developing in the first place.

At the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Primary Industries in Australia, the intranet project team created a blog to help them develop, refine and bug-test their intranet, which was recently named in the Nielsen Norman Group's "10 best intranets of 2008".

The intranet project team, led by internal communications manager Kate Needham, used the blog to review several iterations of the site, fine-tuning design aspects, smoothing out navigation and testing common uses. In this issue, we summarize the process in six steps.

Step 1. Recruiting a virtual group
At first, 30 volunteers were recruited from a wide range of areas in the Department and tasked with reviewing the content and site navigation and immediately identifying problems with the intranet. The geographical locations and low budget afforded to the intranet project team meant that physically bringing all 30 members together was going to be difficult. Instead, Needham’s team created a virtual focus group blog.

Step 2. User testing and discussion
Team members were asked to look at and use the intranet, focusing on what worked, what didn’t work, what was clear and what was confusing. Any findings, feedback and comments were then posted on the blog. This virtual discussion took off and provided the team with lots of areas to work on.

Step 3. Topic grouping/design input
Following round one of discussion, the team carried out a content audit. The team leader posted a “cardsorting” task on the blog, using a spreadsheet with 100 representative content items from the intranet set up in individual cells. Each member was asked to cut and paste the content cells into columns on a new worksheet, grouping the items in a way that made sense to them, and then give names to the groups.

“We gave them the freedom to have items in more than one group, and to also have sub-groups,” says Needham. We emphasized that there were no right or wrong answers, and that they should try to ignore how items are currently organized on the intranet.”

Step 4. Examining trends and patterns
“When we got the spreadsheets back we looked for trends and patterns, and created some prototypes around them. These prototypes were then posted on the blog and discussion continued,” says Needham.

Step 5. The HTML prototype
With feedback on individual prototypes, the next step was to create a full HTML prototype of the site. Project members were given specific tasks and guidelines to test under, and then report their findings on the blog.

“There were quite a few insights at this stage, mainly to do with some of the terminology we’d used in navigation, but nothing that sent us back to the drawing board,” says Needham. “After a few tweaks to the prototype, we asked team members to test the site with another colleague, and share the results on the blog again. This time there were far fewer issues and the reference group members agreed that we should proceed to implement the ideas in the final prototype.”

Step 6. Further refinement and consensus
Via more blog posts and discussion, further changes and tweaks were made as the navigation was refined and design alternatives provided, until the site was ready to launch.

Success with a blog
“The virtual focus groups were a real success story in our redesign,” says Needham. “They allowed us to involve a broad range of users, and to keep the costs to a minimum. There are a lot of collaborative tools that might have worked better, but we happened to have a blog available, so it was going to be quicker and cheaper than setting something else up,” she adds.

“People could also participate in their own time, they could do the tasks in context (i.e. while actually looking at the intranet), and the conversation seemed to flow well. In the end, this way of working was far more successful than we could have imagined at the outset.”

Best regards,

Alex Manchester
Editor
alex.manchester@melcrum.com

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