“Have I left our intranet and gone into someone else’s
website?” This is the kind of thing Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF) experts
hear quite often when benchmarking large scale intranets in different regions.
Users feel they have somehow travelled from an online environment they know and
can navigate to a place that “feels different”.
The effect of this shift in user experience is to disorientate
users and cause them to lose confidence in where they have arrived. They leave
the intranet they know and find themselves in the world of major HR systems
like People Soft or other enterprise systems like Oracle and SAP. At IBF we are
mounting a campaign to try and surface this issue and have it taken on board
within the large scale third party application vendors.
We started this journey in 2007 – initiated by one of our
IBF Members BT and specifically Mark
Morrell, BT Intranet Manager – and we produced an IBF Member report
called “The usability of third party applications” which had an extensive
checklist of usability features that could be used by procurement teams when
contracting with large technology vendors. The idea was start to get the
likes of Oracle to build these features in to their applications and so improve
user-experience across the board.
It has been a slow process and frankly not a great deal has
improved in the last two years. IBF is mounting this campaign to try and get
this vital topic on the agenda again by linking the campaign into World
Usability Day on 12 November. The theme of that day this year is around
“Sustainability” and while we have promoted “Green Intranet” earlier this year
actively, it is the overall concept of upgrading the ability for third party
intranet apps that attracts us to World Usability Day.
As Mark Morrell has said
poor usability leads to poor productivity; so build the usability standards in
from the start. This issue has now taken on wider importance as intranets move
outside the organisation and with us likely to see intranet services being
experienced and used across mobile devices in “iphone app” style formats where
the usability is essential.
Interestingly Apple allows a wide range of apps to be
developed for the iphone but they must meet a certain level of user experience
standards to do so. That is the thinking and practice that is required.
IBF
is making its checklist of standards within this IBF Report freely available to
be adopted by those on the “customer side" –
i.e. large and medium size enterprises and also on the “vendor side” – i.e.
large technology vendors. It is not perfect but it is a solid set of shared
expectations.
What we notice is that small technology vendors seem to
place a higher regard for usability perhaps because they cannot take their
marketplace “for granted” or perhaps because getting changes made is simpler in
smaller companies. It seems that if you talk to people at Oracle and SAP they
“get the message” but somehow that does not seem to translate into upgraded
standards. Over the next week IBF will use a variety of routes to raise this issue and try to make further progress in what has been a
frustrating issue for the intranet industry.
You can download
the checklist for free from IBF’s Online Shop.
