Pat’s Point of View

It’s quite apparent that the lowly intranet is a surprisingly unpopular thing among web designers and developers. Why is this? I’ve done some thinking, in an attempt to get under the skin of the issue.

Now, I can think of quite a few reasons to steer clear of working on an intranet. For instance, there’s the dreaded ‘internal project’ syndrome, characterised by lack of support and resources. Add to this is the view that “it’s just a couple of web pages, you can just whip that up this afternoon right?”. Other core business systems would never be instituted in this way.

There’s typically a constant stream of work, as well trying to plan for the future. Balancing all the things they could possibly do, versus day to day maintenance, is a nightmare situation. Intranets are a journey not a destination but quite often it’s seen as a discrete project; something you build and then don’t have to touch. So planning is crucial, but planning what to do and when, with limited resources, is often the biggest dilemma with an intranet.

Intranet teams find it difficult to get recognition of their plight and the resources needed. Things get worse whenever ‘corporate systems’ are involved (interfacing with them is one of the most powerful things an intranet can do, ala portal), which can quickly turn into a long, hard slog. Particularly when viewed from the point of view of ‘internet time’ these difficulties and delays can make it look like the intranet is at a standstill and those in the drivers seat have lost the plot. Intranet team members often burn-out trying to get everything done, feeling overwhelmed and unsatisfied.

In short, there are many real problems with working on an intranet, mostly concerned with strategy, planning and management. Intranet managers and the people within organisations who have to deal with these issues are usually not web designers or developers…they’re more likely to be librarians or administrative personnel. (Answers to many of these issues are emerging and generally the situation is improving in many of the organisations I work with.)

But the thing is I don’t think these are the reasons why web designers and developers don’t like intranets. Their reasons seem to be more like:

• Most intranets suck — lousy design, out of date, zillions of pages of text, slow, unreliable. In a word: useless. This doesn’t set them in a very flattering light. Why would anyone in their right mind want to work on an intranet when this is the only example they’ve seen?
• Internal website — a lot of issues still surround this misunderstanding that intranets are just ‘internal websites’. This is the wrong way of thinking which leads to useless intranets. A paradigm shift is needed to design an intranet properly.
• Low profile — intranets are pretty much invisible. You can’t tell your friends about it. There’s no recognition internally, or externally—conferences and web design awards rarely want to hear about the super-duper intranet you’ve created. It won’t add a big brand to your CV.
• Not sexy — intranets are tools not toys. The level of creative is low or nonexistent, which will immediately put off many designers. You probably won’t win an award for an intranet, or have people make the “ooooh” noise when you show them your design.
• Insignificant — intranets are usually thought of as little projects that aren’t worthy of their attention. The impact a good intranet can have on an organisation doesn’t factor in a web designers equation…there’s no fame and fortune.

Most of these perceptions are only perpetuated by those higher up the chain of command who don’t understand the purpose or value of an intranet, and put emphasis on the wrong things.

Of course, I should say that it’s not a case of designers and developers (and user experience folks) not being involved at all. On the contrary, I’ve seen many cases where designers or design agencies have been given work to redesign intranets. The problem is they don’t know what to do since they’re used to working on (public) websites. So they get plenty of opportunities to do the work, but they do it badly. And it’s not necessarily their fault.

But even in these scenarios, it’s a struggle to get teams to work on intranet projects. Intranets are the projects you run away from. Don’t touch them with a ten foot pole (I believe this is a uniquely Australian phrase, so heaven only knows what the rest of you make of it). I should say, I’m talking about external teams of designers and developers here, in-house teams usually have little choice.

There appear to be two things needed. Firstly, I think we need to raise the level of awareness around how to do intranets properly. We need to get those who know (and they do exist!) to educate those with the opportunity. A cross pollination of skills. That should increase the general quality of the solutions being produced (for the good of man-kind yada yada).

Many people who specialise in intranet strategy, information management and knowledge management have developed great ideas around these areas. These are business people—intranet managers, CIOs, CKOs and librarians—people who didn’t necessarily choose the role of intranet guardian. They have little or no connection with the web community on the ‘outside’, yet many have at least attempted to bridge the gap by taking a keen interest in web design and usability. They read lots of books and go to training courses and seminars.

The cross pollination seems decidedly unidirectional. I’d like to see things swing the other way to a certain extent. The web design community could learn a lot about intranets from sources they wouldn’t normally consider.

At face value, the web community appears open to new things. Many designers have embraced usability and information architecture. Web developers have embraced accessibility. The growth of UX is testament to this openness. Indeed those in the user experience field often look to other disciplines (such as anthropology and psychology) to learn techniques and expand their knowledge.

But at the end of the day this seems to be only on the fringe. I think the core of the community is fairly insular and happy to continue doing what they do in the way which they have always done it. Thus, when asked to redesign an intranet, many of those given the opportunity will approach it in precisely the same manner as a public website (which they might be pretty good at).

A gauge I often use to track the state-of-the-art is the range of books available. At present, you would struggle to find one book that mentions intranets (other than propagating the ‘internal website’ misnomer). So the cross pollination is not being facilitated. Much of this may be due to the very nature of intranets; internal, confidential, secret. This may or may not change with the arrival of NNg’s Ten Best Intranets, Step Two’s Intranet Innovation Awards and the Intranet Leadership Forum.

The second issue—and the one more relevant to this post—is that of promoting the benefits of intranet work, and selling this to designers and developers is probably worth a shot. For starters, there is a level of gratification surrounding a successful intranet that you just don’t get with a website; seeing—if not actually experiencing—the productivity gains that result from your work is very satisfying. Other selling points include:

• Captive audience — this brings many advantages, particularly around cross-browser development and engaging users (recruiting usability test subjects!).
• Bigger challenge — to flip things on their head, the challenges with an intranet are bigger than with a website, in my opinion. If you like building meaty sites, intranets will get you off.
• More functionality — the opportunity for more complex interactions (beyond browsing pages) exists more so on intranets: tools for staff, personalisation, integration with other business systems. Your typical website has less (or none) of this.
• Freedom to experiment — with an intranet there isn’t that huge pressure of the ‘live site’. You get more than one shot (within reason) at getting it right. This makes it easier for incremental design and evolving solutions to be used.
• Commercial free — whilst it would be very wrong to say that intranets are free from politics, but at least the more overt aspects that designers and developers find frustrating (banner ads etc) do not usually exist on an intranet.

Generally, as web design (and its practitioner) matures, the emphasis is again shifting from art to function (precisely what design should be all about). Empowering staff fits squarely in the category of making things work better, as opposed to simply making things look better. This a key benefit in my mind. Or maybe I’m just getting old and nothing has change, except me.

Will this appeal to the web folks? I’m not sure, but I’d like to think so. With reference to my recent rant about web developers having the power, perhaps the company’s intranet is the vehicle with which to not only allow developers to get more actively involved, but also to raise the profile of working on intranets.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 6:14 pm and is filed under Intranets, Web design. If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to leave a comment, find out more about me or follow @patrickkennedy on Twitter.

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