Janice James, one of Perficient’s experts in User Centered Design, forwarded to me an article about a new study on the state of intranet portals. This study was conduct by Jakob Nielsen, who has been described as the “guru of web page usabililty”. Overall, he has done 67 case studies to support the recommendations he makes.
In his latest study, Intranet Portals: Personalization Hot, Mobile Weak, Governance Essentialy, Dr. Nielsen presents 19 case studies on Portal design. The title of the paper suggests the findings of study. Below, I highlight the major findings:
- Slow progress in mobile – one of the biggest findings of the study is that “portals are not adding mobile features at the expected rate.” We have been saying that mobile portal is a different design point than the standard web-based portal. Dr. Nielsen provides support for that conclusion: “Good mobile usability requires a separate design with a reduced feature set for mobile use cases, focusing on time- and location-dependent tasks. It’s not enough to make an existing portal accessible through phones because the UI is optimized for desktop use. “
- Governance is sorely needed – “At this point, not enough companies have intranet governance ‘solved’ to offer insights that are broadly applicable as best practices. ” We see this with many of our first time portal customers too. There is no ‘packaged’ solution to governance either, so you can’t just buy it off the shelf. Mike Porter and I have blogged about portal governance quite a bit in the past and Mike has presented our governance framework at variance conferences in the past. If you want to do governance right, you should customize our framework for your particular situation. Dr. Nielsen describes a five layer governance model that worked for Duke Energy and is very similar to Perficient’s governance framework.
- Personalization is important – we’ve been talking about information overload for what, a decade now? Personalization is a way to filter out only the information in which you are interested. But getting to true personalization is hard: “Unfortunately, effective personalization is a tough nut to crack. Even though leading portal software platforms offer personalization features, you shouldn’t underestimate how much work is needed to fully implement them.” In most cases, its not enough to offer a user a “My Page” and let them customize it. While this is a good first step, there will be plenty of other pages on your portal where the user will want to filter out content that doesn’t interest them.
You have to pay for Dr. Nielsen’s full study, but if you are interested in great portal design recommendations, it will be worth you money. You can find the full report here: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/portals/
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