- Launch User-Centric, Participatory Research: As a first step, begin to gather user input — and develop field skills — with interviews, card sorting exercises and scenario observations.
- Use Available Metrics to Set the Baseline: Site analytics from the current intranet tell you who uses it, for how long and what parts are avoided.
- Analyze Intranet Help Desk Records to Identify Top Problem Areas: Doing so provides direct insight into the main hurdles to wider adoption.
- Interview Users to Discover Needs: However, keep in mind that people often describe how they would like to work rather than how they actually do.
- Observe and Record Users to Study Work Behaviors: It's the best way to understand both particular work habits and uncover design flaws that remain hidden from the experts on the design team.
- Engage Users to Reveal Organizational Habits and Priorities: For example, card sorting helps to discover how they organize, access and manipulate information.
- Create Personas to Guide Design Decisions: Personas provide key information about users' goals, attitudes and behaviors that is required for effective interaction design.
- Deploy Ongoing Usability Testing: A spectrum of users should repeatedly test paper prototypes, wireframe mockups and coded development interfaces in contexts that encourage them to give utterly frank feedback.
- Identify "Carrots" that Can Help Wean Users Off of Old Methods: You can encourage change by presenting users with clear improvements to their current work habits.
- Conduct a Heuristic Test: It's difficult for intranet team members to "forget" their knowledge of the system, so heuristic tests are more valuable when conducted by outside evaluators.
TIM WALTERS, Ph.D., is a senior analyst at Forrester Research, where he serves information and knowledge management professionals. For more information, visit www.forrester.com.
