| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Dec | Feb » | |||||
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | 31 | |||||
Will It Fly? How to Know if Your New Business Idea Has Wings...Before You Take the Leap
Posted: Tuesday, January 24th, 2006
Category: Web Development and Design, Articles
Author: Wahyudi
Jacob Nielsen has issued the annual top 10 best intranets of 2006. The complete report with screenshots is available if you want to purchase it for $148, it is too much for me, but his latest alert box give us an overview about some interesting points why those intranet became the top ten this year. I try to summarize the article in a meaningful categories and give my opinion to each of it.
A consistent look and feel is still the fundament of a good intranet branding. This should communicate the image of the company to the employee. According to the article, almost all winner have made a big effort to accomplish a consistent look and feel across their intranet. I think this is good but sometimes it is not good enough. In my last experience i still saw a lot of intranet pages within a corporation intranet landscape still having a different look and feel even if they have invested in developing a full coverage of web design guidelines or providing easy to use templates. For some reason those templates is not compatible with the content management system (CMS) of the company which can lead to the situation where a department has to build their own pages and integrate the CMS into the pages. CMS should make the mission of a consistent look and feel easy for everyone. Templates provided by the organization developing the guideline should be integrated in the CMS which let users choose the look and any design elements they want.
Even though it is nice to have something that has name than just “Intranet”, but I agree with the article that intranet is an internal product that mostly exclusive within a company and it does have to compete against hundred other intranets within the same company.
Breadcrumbs and task-based information architectures are two topics that mentioned in the article. Breadcrumbs as a vital navigation aid for intranets and task-based information architecture is a continuing trend in how the intranets are organized. It is interesting and I think also an important step to move the concept of task-based information architecture to how user find information using search features on intranets. We see how it works with personalized advertising in internet for example on Google page where the paid advertising is matched to the key word used by the user. Other example is personalized advertising within members area of services such as multiply.com, friendster.com where the advertising is matched according to user profile (hobbies, music taste, etc). Would it be great to rank or categorize search results within an intranet according to user profile in this case would be work related profile such as the function of the user, title, area of responsibility, location.
Some interesting idea on how to use multimedia solution also mentioned in the article. IBM for example use audio for the employee name pronunciation on its employee directory. From my latest experience with company intranet I know that we can see video for news, announcement, etc, but I think this is less productive because the employee have to break their work to watch the video. More productive would be audio podcast, since many people hear music using ear phone while they are working, why not hearing podcast for work related topics such as tutorial, learning or news.
Blog is the only application that represents what we call social tool. According to the article, IBM has an extensive use of weblogs. When i was at Siemens, blog was an unfamiliar tool, I was one of maybe two employee who are blogging at that time. Well many know that term but they don’t really know what it is and what for. Yes what for? “we already have our discussion forum”. This was what I heard if I talked about blog with of people there, indeed in a small learning session with blog as its topic we had to agree with the meaning of blog as the future form of discussion forum. Yes it is sad. Actually blog can be very useful as a knowledge sharing tool. Yeah finally blog meets what high level manager in big companies always talking about: knowledge management, knowledge sharing. But still “why blogging?“. If they are clever on keeping up with this new wave of internet which i see based on sharing and participation, they can offer their employee more tools for productivity, think about del.icio.us, basecamp (yes, doing project management with Word template makes me sad), or wiki.
Intranet page views climbed up for an average of 106% after redesign, that what all the winner experienced. The fact is we really do have a new kind of internet, why not intranet? I’m sure many of them still not user centered, not good enough structured, or not ready for the future growth in term of how they are developed e.g. “web standards? “what is that, no, please don’t put any CSS within the header, because our CMS does not allow that”. But how can i change the color so that it matches our guidelines? “well just put font tag with color attribute around the text you want to change the color”. That was a real dialog, between me and a web master of the department intranet headquarter. Redesign or rebuild the page with proper use of code will bring you some advantages. It has been almost a year since i made this experiment and when I purposed it to the head of web strategy, he told me that they already work with an agency, hmm where are the web masters, web developers, web strategists, web gurus from the organization? Until now the page is still the same old one: old-school. The article mentioned that this year’s winners took an average of ten months to redesign their intranets, which is according to the article fairly speedy.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Posted: Tuesday, January 24th, 2006
Category: Web Development and Design, Articles
Author: Wahyudi
Jacob Nielsen has issued the annual top 10 best intranets of 2006. The complete report with screenshots is available if you want to purchase it for $148, it is too much for me, but his latest alert box give us an overview about some interesting points why those intranet became the top ten this year. I try to summarize the article in a meaningful categories and give my opinion to each of it.
A consistent look and feel is still the fundament of a good intranet branding. This should communicate the image of the company to the employee. According to the article, almost all winner have made a big effort to accomplish a consistent look and feel across their intranet. I think this is good but sometimes it is not good enough. In my last experience i still saw a lot of intranet pages within a corporation intranet landscape still having a different look and feel even if they have invested in developing a full coverage of web design guidelines or providing easy to use templates. For some reason those templates is not compatible with the content management system (CMS) of the company which can lead to the situation where a department has to build their own pages and integrate the CMS into the pages. CMS should make the mission of a consistent look and feel easy for everyone. Templates provided by the organization developing the guideline should be integrated in the CMS which let users choose the look and any design elements they want.
Even though it is nice to have something that has name than just “Intranet”, but I agree with the article that intranet is an internal product that mostly exclusive within a company and it does have to compete against hundred other intranets within the same company.
Breadcrumbs and task-based information architectures are two topics that mentioned in the article. Breadcrumbs as a vital navigation aid for intranets and task-based information architecture is a continuing trend in how the intranets are organized. It is interesting and I think also an important step to move the concept of task-based information architecture to how user find information using search features on intranets. We see how it works with personalized advertising in internet for example on Google page where the paid advertising is matched to the key word used by the user. Other example is personalized advertising within members area of services such as multiply.com, friendster.com where the advertising is matched according to user profile (hobbies, music taste, etc). Would it be great to rank or categorize search results within an intranet according to user profile in this case would be work related profile such as the function of the user, title, area of responsibility, location.
Some interesting idea on how to use multimedia solution also mentioned in the article. IBM for example use audio for the employee name pronunciation on its employee directory. From my latest experience with company intranet I know that we can see video for news, announcement, etc, but I think this is less productive because the employee have to break their work to watch the video. More productive would be audio podcast, since many people hear music using ear phone while they are working, why not hearing podcast for work related topics such as tutorial, learning or news.
Blog is the only application that represents what we call social tool. According to the article, IBM has an extensive use of weblogs. When i was at Siemens, blog was an unfamiliar tool, I was one of maybe two employee who are blogging at that time. Well many know that term but they don’t really know what it is and what for. Yes what for? “we already have our discussion forum”. This was what I heard if I talked about blog with of people there, indeed in a small learning session with blog as its topic we had to agree with the meaning of blog as the future form of discussion forum. Yes it is sad. Actually blog can be very useful as a knowledge sharing tool. Yeah finally blog meets what high level manager in big companies always talking about: knowledge management, knowledge sharing. But still “why blogging?“. If they are clever on keeping up with this new wave of internet which i see based on sharing and participation, they can offer their employee more tools for productivity, think about del.icio.us, basecamp (yes, doing project management with Word template makes me sad), or wiki.
Intranet page views climbed up for an average of 106% after redesign, that what all the winner experienced. The fact is we really do have a new kind of internet, why not intranet? I’m sure many of them still not user centered, not good enough structured, or not ready for the future growth in term of how they are developed e.g. “web standards? “what is that, no, please don’t put any CSS within the header, because our CMS does not allow that”. But how can i change the color so that it matches our guidelines? “well just put font tag with color attribute around the text you want to change the color”. That was a real dialog, between me and a web master of the department intranet headquarter. Redesign or rebuild the page with proper use of code will bring you some advantages. It has been almost a year since i made this experiment and when I purposed it to the head of web strategy, he told me that they already work with an agency, hmm where are the web masters, web developers, web strategists, web gurus from the organization? Until now the page is still the same old one: old-school. The article mentioned that this year’s winners took an average of ten months to redesign their intranets, which is according to the article fairly speedy.
You must be logged in to post a comment.