5 ways to help you improve intranet applications
December 10, 2008 at 5:12 pm | Posted in application, help, intranet, standards, Uncategorized | 4 CommentsTags: help, intranet applications, oracle, usability standards
In my last two postings I have touched on the problems I find intranet users have with usability of applications they have to use. I covered in ‘Why are intranet applications so difficult to use?’ the common problems users have to overcome. I then suggested in ‘Why doesn’t vanilla = usable with intranet applications?’ how software vendors could prevent these problems.
Here are some easy steps to help you with these problems.
- Publish a set of usability standards you want all application owners to follow.
- Have an agreed owner of the usability standards who has credibility and can help application owners.
- Get the buy in from key people across the business to accept the standards and improve their applications’ usability.
- Make sure your standards are embedded into your procurement and development processes to prevent the problems getting worse.
- Review intranet applications at least one a year with the owner against your usability standards.
BT has managed to do all 5 steps. The user experience with our intranet applications is slowly improving – slowly because of the difficulties getting software vendors to get involved.
In my next post I’ll cover what our usability standards for intranet applications are. Let me know if there is other help I can give…………..or you can help me with.
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[...] Mark Morrell An insight into how intranets are managed « 5 ways to help you improve intranet applications [...]
Pingback by 14 steps to improve your applications’ usability « Mark Morrell— December 17, 2008 #
I think point 6 would be to get these standards embedded into the contracting and procurement processes. For us at Shell, CP is the front line when negotiating with these vendors.
Comment by Andrew Fix— January 6, 2009 #
Andrew,
Too right! That’s the best way of preventing any further problems happening.
Mark
Comment by markmorrell— January 7, 2009 #
[...] ideas for how to improve intranet usability. There are also many freely available well-documented best practices as well as costly-but-well-written analyst reports. Significant progress seems to be stalled [...]
Pingback by J. Boye | Make your intranet easier to use in 2010— February 10, 2010 #