Invitations and Becomings

Unlike internet sites, on intranet sites consideration is rarely given to the user experience. UX is paid lip service in the form of consistency of branding. Yet people spend far more time on an intranet site. So, while it obviously isn't motivated by sales, UX and usability in general are actually a lot more important on intranet sites than their appearance would suggest.

One of the most noticeable ways in which intranet sites fail in this regard is in navigation, which usually reflects the organisation of the business rather than the needs of the user. To an extent, this is unavoidable, since the demographics on intranet users for a large companyand use-cases involved are bound to be far more complicated than they are for an public internet site. Every different job places different demands on the site.

Obviously, then, it is often impractical to try to evaluate and negotiate these different demands top down. But

why not a bottom-up solution? Why not provide resources for personalising some of the navigation? Why not also enable some navigation to be driven by the fancies and wisdom of the crowds?

A possible solution is to develop a facility for displaying user-generated shortcuts on the homepage. This replicates what people already do when they save bookmarks in their browser, with one great advantage - you have the data and can re-package it to add another functionality: most popular shortcuts.

Actually, I'd suggest you have three tabs to this tool:

• My shortcuts
• Popular shortcuts
• Hot pages - pages receiving a lot of traffic today

Hot pages will help the viral-spread of communications that users think are important, and requires nothing more than standard site analytics.

My shortcuts and Popular shortcuts work together. Naturally, when someone adds a page to their personal shortcuts, it improves its rank in Popular shortcuts.

You might also configure Popular shortcuts to be group specific, so new members would immediately be able to see where co-workers go for their information.

But the great advantage to is that those responsible for the standard intranet navigation can immediately see how that navigation can be improved, by bringing popular information sources up the site heirarchy.