Chris Fleming

Tag: intranet

  • 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 the Eventbrite 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.

  • An agile intranet

    We designed our intranet to be continuously improved, and over recent weeks have been doing just that. Since the intranet’s launch last year we have gathered data and done extensive research to deepen our insights into our users’ behaviour. This is enabling us to flex our product to meet our users’ changing needs – in line with digital best practice.

    In our most recent development sprint, we focussed on the homepage. The intranet homepage is the first thing most people in the department see when they log on in the morning, so it’s not surprising that 99.9% of user journeys begin there. That’s not true of all websites – GOV.UK pages are often reached via a search engine – but our default makes the homepage a prime piece of digital real estate. It deserves excellent design and only the most important content or features.

    From looking at site traffic we could see the content users visited most over the past year. For instance: guidance on performance management, expenses claims, booking video conferencing, and a few specific  forms. Over the last month or so, content about the DH2020 change programme has also been very popular.

    This data informed our qualitative research. We interviewed twenty-one individuals, asking them about their use of the intranet. We also observed them using the homepage to try and perform particular tasks. As well as interviews, we ran card sorting exercises and a co-design workshop where users drew sketches of their ideal homepages, or voted on features they liked from other government intranets. The range of ideas generated ranged from the pragmatic to the extravagant. But the discussion was invaluable in helping our suppliers understand the needs of DH staff. Over two weeks our experts translated those insights into some of the changes you can now see:

    • Bringing in common design patterns by integrating the menu, search and login into the header to help users find them
    • Developing prominent areas for links to popular services and pages; these are customisable by our content team so can change as needs change
    • Introducing a campaign box to highlight the most important ‘need-to-know’ information of the moment
    • Increasing the number of news stories further down the page; as the large number of users felt the stories dropped off the homepage too quickly
    • Retaining a clean design that users responded to well, but binning the bits that users did not need or want anymore

    Communicating via Slack across several UK locations, the team deployed the changes early last Tuesday morning. Thanks to the brilliant work of the developers we encountered almost no bugs, and by the time we got into the office some fantastic feedback had started to come in.

    Launching is the start of a process, not the end. We’re moving straight into more user testing, including those using assistive technologies, to ensure our changes are performing as we want.

    An ‘agile intranet’ is something the department should be proud of. Internal services and tools are rarely built in this way. It has only been possible for us to effect improvements to this product quickly, cheaply, and securely thanks to our predecessors. They left us a site built on open source software, to open standards, with no contract lock-in, and with the precedent set for relentless focus on user needs. Long may that continue.

    Originally posted to Digital Health Blog.