One Intranets Vancouver: Intranets, extranets, portals: October 2004

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Short, practical tips on building better intranets. Sign up to receive new ideas by email.

Users are selfish, lazy and ruthless

Monday, October 25, 2004

Nielsen's article about information foraging says that humans are inherently lazy. When we're using an intranet, we want maximum benefit for minimum effort.

While navigating, we constantly perform cost-benefit analyses:

What gain can I expect from this information?
What is the likely cost (time and effort) to discover and consume that information?

To support the behavior of your intranet users--to support "information snacking"--follow these three rules:

Support short visits
Encourage users to return
Emphasize search engine visibility and otherwise address users' immediate needs

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User Interface Design Patterns

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

Interface design patterns help designers solve common interface problems. Unlike templates, they don't attempt to set standards for an entire web page--they concentrate on just one aspect of a page. 20 or 30 design patterns for an intranet is probably 10 times more useful than 20 or 30 templates.

Web design patterns: Great examples on a wide range of interface issues
Jenifer Tidewell's site: Solutions to common web interface problems
Interaction Patterns in User Interfaces (PDF): White paper with solutions to common user challenges with Windows applications

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50 Ideas for Intranet Applications

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

This list is from The Intranet Journal. Many of these applications will not be relevant or practical for your organization, but it's a great source of ideas for your portal.

Sales & marketing applications

Product demos & sales scripts
Product information
Sales forecasts and reports
Sales contact management
Sales lead management
Market research
Solicit input from field personnel
Press releases
Sales team collaboration tools
Calendars
Sales training

Human resources applications

Employee handbook
People directory
Benefits information
Retirement/ pension centre
Employee surveys
Internal recruiting
External recruiting
Candidate screening
Org charts
Newsletters
Company calendar
Employee classifieds

Engineering applications

Online project conferences
Project documentation
Project management
Engineering change orders
Workflow management
Standards and methodology documentation
Engineering libraries
QA feedback
Technical papers
Central repository for shared development
Prototype applications

Customer service applications

Consolidated online information for customer service personnel
Frequently asked questions
Customer information entry and update
Order entry and tracking
Problem entry and tracking
Bug fixes
Warranty claims and processing
Problem escalation
Training

Finance and accounting applications

Financial reports
Policies and procedures
Historical budgeting data
Asset management
Expense reports
Unit reporting and forecasting
Accounts payable/receivable history and status
Payroll information
Purchase orders

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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.