Month: June 2016

Intranet iterations

We’ve been doing some more work on our intranet. Here’s a rundown of our latest release and some final thoughts on what I’ve learnt working on this product.

Why take a digital approach to an intranet?

I’ve said in previous posts that intranets can be the scorn of digital purists. “Why not just have a wiki and a blog – it’s totally free?” they cry. Well, maybe.

But as this is my last intranet sprint (sprintranet?) I wanted to make the case for taking a digital approach to this ever present departmental tool. I think there are 4 compelling reasons.

  1. Improved experience for users. The obvious one. Civil servants are users too, and saving them time and effort with products that work is better for them, and better for taxpayers.
  2. It’s a means of spreading digital culture and techniques widely across the department. Talking to lots of teams in the department about their intranet content or involving them in user research has enabled me to introduce principles of agile and user-centred design to lots of people who otherwise would never have encountered these techniques. A good thing in the wider scheme of digital transformation.
  3. Getting content design more widely understood. I’m increasingly convinced that content design training should join information security and unconscious bias as mandatory for policy civil servants. Until that happens, working with teams on their intranet content is a decent alternative.
  4. It’s a good training ground. A staff intranet is a reasonably low stakes environment, which makes it ideal for practising agile techniques, user testing and the like. Particularly as uses are on your door step. Four different fast streamers have now participated in running guerrilla testing or pop up labs in the department, and done brilliantly at it.

On to the highlights of our latest release. As ever, if anyone is interested in playing around with the intranet WordPress theme, it’s available on Github. All comments and thoughts welcomed.

Homepage

In our last intranet post we talked about the changes to the homepage design. The changes have attracted a lot of great comments. But more importantly our ongoing testing is showing users are completing popular tasks more easily.

Of course not everything is working perfectly, so we are continuing to tweak and improve. For instance we found users were not noticing when new content was being posted in the campaign box. So we introduced a ‘new’ banner to signal this event.

Screen shot of 'new' banner on intranet homepage

Information architecture

Our ongoing user research has repeatedly surfaced pain points for users navigating the site. Users did not always understand the main section headings, or what topics might be listed underneath.

To test further we ran several card sorting sessions to try and come up with better labels and a more intuitive architecture. Despite plenty of hard work, it turned out we couldn’t. Naming and sorting things into categories is just one of those timeless problems. We ended up agreeing that what we had was probably the least worst option.

To attack the problem from another angle we introduced some new functionality. We implemented the brilliantly named Accessible Mega Menu. This now provides a drop down of topics that appears underneath a section heading, to help users see what is available and help them answer their questions more quickly.

Screen shot of drop down menu on intranet homepage

Events

The department puts on a wide range of events.  By making use of theEventbrite API, our intranet administrators are able to create and manage events using all the functionality of Eventbrite. Once published, the event details are pulled automatically into the relevant intranet pages. Along with some design tweaks, we’ve made an already excellent events booking process even better.

Screen shot of events box on intranet events page

Our next sprint will be later in the year. Look out for further updates from a new product manager then.  And a final word of good luck and thanks to the brilliant team. My laptop will continue to wear our mission patch with pride.

This post was originally published on the Digital Health blog.

Bridging the digital language divide

Digital transformation in government will require civil servants of all professions to pull in the same direction. Digital, policy, procurement, finance, analysis. All on the same page. But those groups often do not work in the same way. This slows us down.

One notable difference in approach is language use.

Take the digital profession. Digital in government has a particularly distinct lexicon. Hearing someone mention ‘user needs’ unprompted is a pretty accurate identifier of one of its members. Certainly moreso than owning a MacBook.

This profession is also packed with devotees of agile, favouring individuals and interactions over processes and tools. No surprise then that they have a plethora of terms to describe different types of discussion. Stand-up, sprint plan, inception, retrospective, futurespective, show-and-tell. All brilliantly useful. Once you know what they are.

Other government tribes have languages too of course. If you talk about ‘requirements’, it’s likely you are a member of IT profession. A mention of ‘key milestones’ outs you as a project manager. When I first joined the civil service as a policy professional I recall being asked to do a ministerial ‘sub’. As 50% New Yorker I couldn’t fathom how making the Secretary of State asandwich could possibly help.

The language issue feels important to me. As well as the misunderstandings it can lead to, it is a canary in the mineshaft of deeper divisions. So how could we improve things?

In the field of foreign language teaching, academic experts have long agreed that teaching a foreign language is much harder without also acknowledging the culture, i.e. the beliefs, values and behaviours, of the other. True understanding requires knowledge not just of words, but of words in their proper context.

Anyone who has talked at length about user needs to blank faces will recognise the problems caused by a lack of shared understanding of context. It may be possible for others to understand the words and the everyday meaning, but developing the reflex that if a user fails it’s our fault and not theirs does not happen overnight. ‘He/She doesn’t get it’ is a phrase one may hear among digital circles. But remember to our audience we can sound like the most naive of broken records.

Education professionals have thought at length about how best to learn about other cultures. Prof Mike Byram at Durham University has developed a series of ‘savoirs’ or competencies* for intercultural skills. Two stand out as particularly relevant to interdisciplinary working in government.

  • Ability to evaluate perspectives in one’s own and other cultures.There are many teams who run services from a pre-digital spend controls era and have not encountered a new way of doing things through no fault of their own. What might we be taking for granted which we need to question?
  • Readiness to suspend disbelief about other cultures and belief about one’s own. A former policy colleague recently remarked he felt he would be laughed out of the room if it was ever suggested that a policy person just might be able to do something useful in a delivery role. This perception has to change.

Beyond a shared understanding of language then, we need to share experience of digital culture: values of being user-focussed, open, sharing, collaborative, experimental, all underpinned and connected by the shared infrastructure of the Internet. The digital profession is better than many at demonstrating and sharing its values, but we shouldn’t let up.

At the same time, to foster better and quicker understanding and cooperation we need to see problems from other perspectives. Being good at this is not an innate ability but, as educationalists have shown, is a cognitive skill that can be learnt. In a collaborative era of transformation all professions may need to take skill building in this area more seriously.