3. User Survey
NHS
Stakeholders:
“Front line staff have limited
access to PCs, they need mobile”
Quantitive Survey:
“Your ideal intranet”
“What would you find most
useful”
12. Describe the platform
“Social, community”
“Finding people”
“Sharing content from markets”
What are the business needs?
“Finding files”
“Accessing Assets / guidelines”
Stakeholder Interviews
De Beers
16. I can’t delegate as I don’t
know what’s required
No indication of effort or
timing required
Nicer than
excel
Easy and
intuitiveRemote usability testing
Heineken
17. Nothing wrong with the tool,
instead improve the
communications around the
use of the tool
18. Welcome Pack
• What data was required
• Where/Who/how to get the
data
• Expected Timing
Remote usability testing
Heineken
19. User Persona
Heineken Heineken Sales Rep
Do the real work
On the road as much as possible
Time not spent in front of customers
is a waste of time
But training was mandated
Fiercely competitive
I did want to call this – how not to build intranets that no-one uses – but How to design for engagement sounds better
Through research you gain an understanding: you gain insights. And insights lead to engaging intranets
In the next 6 minutes I am going to take you through some examples where we used different research techniques to gain insights – sometime surprising – that informed the design of the intranets we built for our clients
Starting with an NHS trust we work with
Every intranet brief we receive stipulates a “fully responsive” or mobile interface… though there isn’t much thought put into why or whether anyone would use it.
However in this case, the stakeholders, and honestly we ourselves expected that a key requirement was going to be mobile access. Clinical staff are on the go on the wards, services delivered in the community and so on. It made sense.
But when we carried out a user survey asking them to identify their key requirements
.. only one said mobile. What they wanted was quick and easy access to contacts, policies and procedures and to be kept up with what was happening in the trust. A bit of personalization would be nice.
Anyone who was here last year would recognize these as “reasons to log on” in our Intranet Engagement Framework.
So our insight was …
And that is why we built …
Even though there is a global search we put specific people & policies & procedure searches front and centre of the page
And the users really were interested in news, there was some personalization and further down the page some social features. But essentially the design of this front page matches the results of the survey
But that was a new client and a new intranet.
Many of you will have been working with the same intranet in the same organisation for years.
But so have we!
De Beers has been a client of SmallWorlders for over a decade and been through a few refreshes already!
De Beers has been a client of SmallWorlders for over a decade and been through a few refreshes already!
But needs change, even the business itself changes over time. It is worth going back to stakeholders and users to check if what you thought was a priority was still a priority.
When we asked our client stakeholders what they wanted in this redesign, the described a modern social intranet with great content and conversations happening so everyone in the organization could share ideas and help each other and bring about world peace.
When we asked, when we kept pushing for, the actual business needs the intranet addressed – I got a different response: Finding campaign assets and guidelines.
And it is business needs that will drive the widest usage (again reasons to log on or return for those who were here last year)
As is often the case …
Which is why we designed the homepage like this.
We do support those aspirational requirements that will engage the enthusiasts but again we put the functionality that meets the needs of the broadest set of users front and centre.
Here is a slightly different example.
We do lots of work for Heineken. One of the tools we built for them is a brand planning tool.
The tool is used by 120 of Heineken’s local markets to input their marketing plans and investments for the year. The tool guides them highlighting where their plans may be straying from Heineken’s strategy. Think of an online tax return, but much more complicated with lots more data needed.
It offers huge benefits to Heineken globally and therefore we wanted to ensure the markets continued to use it and more markets would be recruited. In short we wanted to remove barriers to usage.
So we carried out some remote usability testing – recording sessions and shadowing users as they used the tools.
But the usability testing confirmed there were no major problems with usability. There were lots of tweaks we could do obviously, there always are.
But fundamentally it was nicer to use than excel which is what people used to use and people enjoyed using it.
The main problem that they found was that they didn’t know what was required, so they couldn’t delegate the data collection. They just had to go through the tool to find what was next.
There was also no indication of timing required, so a lot of them missed their deadlines because it took them longer than they had planned.
So the insight was …
And this is often the case. How many times are there engagement issues and the response is always “there must be something wrong with the intranet, with the technology”
So at the end of this, we discovered that the greatest impact we could make to achieve our goals was to create a welcome pack.
Not to improve the site itself, but a pack that describes who and where to get the data from, how long it is likely to take, so you can plan ahead, and the data that they will need.
Next up, another project for Heineken. We provide a system to support blended learning in Heineken. They were looking to roll this our to their 22,000 sales people globally.
It had been used by Heineken for a number of years for a few thousand users. But we wanted to consider how it should be adapted to meet the needs of their 22K new users.
So we tried to get an understanding of them by creating a User Persona.
These are some of the highlights
So our insight was that we were dealing with
And this is where the colouring in department really earned their keep.
Using this insight, we tried to make it as fun as possible, get them talking and to encourage voluntary uptake. We recognised their view of themselves as heroes.
We leveraged their competitive natures by getting them to compete with each other, to do more than the mandatory minimum and to try to score as highly as possible.
And at every occasion there was a trigger to encourage them to do more
“only 8 marks away from a merit” … “check out the other resources” , special powers badges (and do you like the superhero profile overlays?)
And the coup de gras - a leaderboard – not just for you as an individual but for your entire team.
We’re in the process of building this now – due to launch in November so we are very excited to see how it performs.
So there you go. Some rapidfire examples of different research techniques and how they led to insights and ultimately engaging intranets.
I’m going to take you through an entire case study from start to finish in our workshop later.
But this is a workshop, so bring your ‘research’ and if you can any ‘insights’ and we will use the collective power of the group to sketch some ideas for you.
That’s it. I’m Kevin Cody. We are SmallWorlders and we build engaging intranets.