How to increase your intranet usage 98 percent
Corporate intranets don’t usually have the “make a profit” requirements of most e-commerce sites, so intranet developers — paradoxically — can give Internet developers some lessons in making a site more usable and popular.
This is the conclusion I draw from the “Intranet Design Annual,” a competition juried by consultants at the Nielsen Norman Group. The group evaluated dozens of submissions to find the 10 Best Intranets of 2001. Here’s the good news: The winning sites reported an average of 98 percent more traffic after implementing redesigns that improved their usability.
Nielsen Norman found that great intranets can be had by large and small companies as well as governmental and nonprofit agencies. The winners of the competition include Cisco Systems, Pearson Technology Centre of London, the Science Applications International, and silverorange, a Web design group in Prince Edward Island, Canada.
The judges describe three principles that were common to all the winners, and would be helpful to anyone developing or trying to improve an Internet site:
1. USE AN ITERATIVE DESIGN PROCESS. By creating mock-ups and then testing them with live users the sites that demonstrated the most improvement were able to make quick shifts in direction. The judges note approvingly that one team “conducted 10-minute user tests that let them get fast data from employees who couldn’t leave their desks for the traditional, hour-long studies.”
2. ENCOURAGE EMPLOYEES TO UPDATE INTRANET CONTENT. Since many intranets are supposed to facilitate internal communications within a company, the best designs made it easy for people to contribute and edit content without having to track down a Webmaster and, as the judges put it, “begging to get their content online.” On an e-commerce site that’s geared for consumers, this lesson can guide a community posting board or other technique you may use to encourage customer feedback. The purchase of a good content management system for this purpose is strongly recommended.
3. LIMIT THE USE OF GRAPHICS. The winning intranets use graphics that are small and relevant, rather than filling up space with useless stock art. One of the winners, silverorange, went so far as to develop a graphics tool that lets users upload, scale, and crop photos to create 50-by-50-pixel “thumbnails.” Keeping graphics small helps those who use 56K modems but also makes a site snappier even for those with high-speed connections.
Nielsen Norman’s Intranet Design Annual is available for $54 as a 111-page PDF file with 72 color illustrations. A summary is also available at the following address without purchasing the report. (See also News Pick #8, below, for more on good intranet design.)
NIELSEN NORMAN GROUP’S “INTRANET DESIGN ANNUAL”:
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E-BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: CPU COOLERS
A whole category of add-on that rarely gets reviewed in mainstream computer mags is the CPU cooler: a device that clips onto a CPU socket and directs a flow of air to reduce the PC’s internal temperature. This is important if you’re a hardcore 3D gamer pushing your CPU load and clock speed, but may also be desirable if your Web servers are constantly processing data and get overly warm.
Maximum3D.com has just finished testing a new crop of CPU coolers. The apparent favorite in the testing turns out to be the Evercool CUC-610, which kept the temperature down in the tests without adding too much fan noise. It’s also quite inexpensive at around $14.
Maximum3D Review of CPU Coolers:
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LIVINGSTON’S TOP 10 NEWS PICKS O’ THE WEEK
1. Plug-and-Play security fix required for Windows XP
2. “Who needs hackers? We’ve got Microsoft” (nice rant)
3. XP spoof: “Gates announces security death squads”
4. Losing your health insurance? The Web can help
5. How Google’s new “mail-order catalog search” works
6. eBay stops 24-year-old woman from auctioning herself
7. What can we learn from the dot-com failures of 2001?
8. How to involve people in your portal design process
9. HTML tips: Use frames well or don’t use them at all
10. World’s best joke declared via 3-month Internet vote
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THIS WEEK’S “THEY CAN’T DO THAT ON THE WEB!” PAGE
Here’s a new low in free entertainment: the Pedestrian Killer game. It’s a Flash animation in which you use your mouse to drive a little car around town, squishing passersby as you careen madly in your browser. It’s totally bizarre and a complete waste of time, but interesting technically. Warning: the site plays a jazzy background tune and the pedestrians emit tiny screams as you flatten them, so you might want to mute your sound card before firing this game up in your office cubicle.
“Pedestrian Killer” Flash Animation:
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WATCH FOR RESULTS OF MY E-BUSINESS SECRETS SURVEY
The preferences of E-Business Secrets readers will be revealed in my Jan. 10 issue, after all the votes are counted. You still have until Jan. 4 to respond to the one-question survey and receive a gift. For details, see the Dec. 20 issue at:
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: E-Business Secrets is written by InfoWorld contributing editor Brian Livingston. Research Director is Ben Livingston (no relation). Brian has published 10 books, including:
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