Top 10 must-read articles for intranet design in 2006

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Top 10 must-read articles for intranet design in 2006

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Are you responsible for an intranet realignment in 2006? Here are the 10 articles that will most shape my thinking on intranets this year:

10. Low Literacy Users: Designing for low literacy users improves usability for everyone. Make important things big, avoid moving text, and streamline page design.

9. Navigation Blindness: How to deal with the fact that people tend to ignore navigation tools.

8. Exploring With Wiki: From 2003, but I didn't read it till 2005. An interview with Ward Cunningham on the goals, strengths and weaknesses of wikis.

7. Wikis and Blogs and Email, Oh My! An interview with JotSpot founder Joe Kraus. Do-it-yourself content: When systems stop asking for permission, participation increases.

6. Customer Experience In 4 Steps: Listen to the stakeholders, listen to the users, synthesize the two inputs, and suggest improvements.

5. Less as a Competitive Advantage: Five things you need less of that you're likely to think you need more of: Less money, less people, less time, less software...

4. Web Design & Development Trends For 2006: Predictions include big fonts, round corners, and the death of IE5.

3. Wikis Make Collaboration Easier: Content management is likely to hybridize with the wiki into a new, more robust application that combines the strengths of both tools

2. The Future of Knowledge Management and Collaboration: Why first generation knowledge management failed, and 23 human information behaviours that KM software has to accommodate

1. More Users = Simpler CMS: The more users that will be accessing the CMS, the simpler (and more usable) the system has to be.

About the Author

I'm Chris McGrath, an intranet consultant in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I've been working on intranets since 1997, and on plain ol' web sites for even longer. I run One Intranets, the firm that co-created ThoughtFarmer -- an enterprise collaboration platform for Windows-based intranets.