The featured tool in this article is Yammer, but the tactics and principles described are valid for whatever intranet collaboration tool you are rolling out. Three critical tactics according to Hanesbrands: Gain leadership support, Partner early with IT, Help employees use the platform & see value.
9 years on from their first survey, Nielsen have produced a new study into the usability of Children’s websites. “It’s now common for a 7-year-old kid to be a seasoned Internet user with several years’ experience.” – If we think that the millennials are the internet generation – in 10-15 years this wave of 7 year olds will be in the marketplace.
A small eye tracking study (14 searches by 7 users) but contains some interesting finding – one such finding was all of their test participants didn’t look at the screen whilst typing their search phrase!
More practical advice from The Intranet Professor. A lick of paint for an un-respected, un-loved, un-used intranet, or full renovation?
Excellent guide to the <head> section of HTML. As technically the head is limitless, there are a number of additional things Alex could have included (but you have to draw the line somewhere!) Nevertheless, one link reference that really should have mentioned is rel=”canonical”.
I Had the pleasure of listening to Opera’s Bruce Lawson evangelise HTML5 at Disruptive Code this week. This Smashing Mag article by him and Remy Sharp is a good primer for those of you who don’t know that much about it.
In 2008 web dev & design site Sitepoint predicted that they wouldn’t be receiving any visits from people using an Internet Explorer browser – here’s their 2010 update. Interesting stats and interesting to see the continued trend of browser usage in the dev/design world.
Read Jesper’s Churchil-eqsue post, then read Amber Naslund’s post 3 Reasons B2B Social Media Makes So Much Sense. Two boxers each waiting to pounce from their respective corners of the ring? Is one of them half-way up the garden path? Can you apply behaviour analysis and “CRM the living shit out of all the data” to B2B customers in the same way you can B2C consumers?
Facebook are experimenting with using QR codes generated whilst you are logged in to the standard site in order to authenticate your log-in to the mobile site. All done in a couple of clicks rather than a load of fiddly typing. Sounds like a usability win to me.
A another look at the classic user v client dilemma. One of the key things to finding a good balance is stakeholder buy-in and inclusion.
An split testing case where removing a green “secure” icon from the page made a vast improvement – their conclusion: “Make each page designed to get the user to do one thing, and try to focus all of their attention on that one thing”.
Alex Manchester in this article from Step Two explores the potential of people search and staff profiles and their role as the very heart of intranet. He also gives examples of people-related concepts in use within organisations today.
Building your entire intranet using Facebook would be an utter nightmare! But let’s not forget the relevance of Facebook as part of internal communication and collaboration. Colleagues who are friends with each other will almost certainly use it to communicate in some way at some point – even if it’s just a “running late for 9am meeting” or “working from home today”. Organisations should consider ways to take advantage of that.
Swedish guidelines published by The Swedish Data Inspection Board recommending how you should deal with communication channels with user generated content, such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube in order to be compliant with Swedish law.
If you are using wordpress for a business site you might want to consider some of the following tweaks – or bring someone in to do them for you.
reality check from Jesper. Yes Google is really important, but it’s not the whole picture. YouTube, Facebook, Intranets, on-site search – Search is a lot more than Google, but it’s all about serving up what people want when they want it.
To quote Oscar: “Most people will come to understand that a social intranet is not just about adding features such as blogs, wikis, activity feeds & micro-blogging on top of a traditional intranet; it’s about rethinking the purpose of intranets with the intention of bringing the paradigm shift in how we communicate & collaborate that is taking place on the web to the very core of how enterprises are operated & managed.”
The significance of enterprise microblogging (or “microlearning”). Not only does it state the importance of status updates in the workplace, but also gives a number of practical examples of their use.
Time after time when we look at intranet stats and surveys we see the evidence that employees just aren’t that interested in news articles – they want things (especially on the start page) that help them get their jobs done.
This translation of a Spanish eye tracking study shows how people’s intentions (they tasks they are trying to complete) affect their behaviour when viewing search engine result pages.
Using QR codes is a cost-effective and straight-forward way to improve visitor interaction at zoos and museums. Hunt down relevant content (perhaps it’s already on your site?) and print some new signs plus some guides for visitors explaining how to scan the codes.
Lots of things here that Halfords could improve and tweak. Interesting to see the start of a trend for “collect in store” (rather than “buy via mobile”). It’s a mistake though to prevent mobile users from accessing the regular “desktop” site.
Anyone involved in creating or managing a website has had “the content problem”. This excellent article lists all the reasons why we should keep on nagging for that content to appear as early in the process as possible.
A smile-inducingly long blog post about reductionism and how it can make your web site more effective. Alex breaks down web site reductionism into three main areas; content, code and design.
Oscar takes the example of Twitter as a technically easy thing to use but perhaps conceptually not so easy and suggests you compare this with your social intranet experiences and draw parallels.
Dennis takes us though what he sees as the “real” down-to-earth definitions of Intranet, Enterprise 2.0 and Social (Intranet) Software.
Choosing the write pricing model. An age old problem. This case study takes us through the experiences of a web start-up who were using freemium pricing plan and the difficulties that came about.
One of the most irritating things of this week has been the Twifficiency application spreading around Twitter. The app itself is utterly useless, but it’s given us an excellent case study into how fast things on the real-time web develop and evolve.
One of the most striking things you can learn from this Gartner report is the rapid growth of Android. In a year the smartphone market share of Android has leaped from 1.8% to 17.2% and thereby flying past iOS (Apple) who only grew 1% to 14.2%. At this rate, Android with dominate the market by mid 2012. It’s not just the tipping point for the mobile web, but the tipping point for Android.