The Communicator’s Guide to Building a Corporate Intranet: Part 4
It’s time to build — or rebuild — your entire corporate intranet! The good news is, the task doesn’t have to be as daunting as it looks. We’re breaking it down into easy steps: In Part 1 of this guide, we explained how to start and whose job the project should be. In Part 2, we talked about audience segmentation: where are your employees, what do they actually do, and what do they need to know? And in Part 3, we started to look at the idea of content: In short, what do you need to say?
So far, so good! Now we need to start putting it all together: How do you develop an organization and navigation strategy to make sure you match your audience to the information they need?
Prioritizing and Organizing Content for Easy Access
Congratulations: The hardest part of this project is complete! You’ve defined your objectives; identified challenges and pain points with your current (or nonexistent) intranet; and taken a deep dive in the structure of your organization. You now know how you’re going to be able to get information to, communicate and engage with all employee groups regardless of where they sit (or don’t), and you’ve organized and can see in front of you all of the content that will now become part of the new intranet. And by working together with so many others in your company and involving them in the process, you can feel confident that when you launch the intranet, everyone will be on board with it.
So, the rest should be easy, right? Well… let’s just say, easier, haha.
Now it’s time to start bringing all of the work that has been done so far to life. We need to start by thinking about how the broad content categories should be organized and where they will be found — literally — on the new intranet.
Related: The Communicator’s Guide to Building an Intranet, Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
This is where the navigational aspects of intranets come into play. For desktop browsing, top level content categories often live on a top navigation, with the option of accessing sub-level categories with dropdown menus. The top or visible portion of a homepage may also display buttons for one-click access to some content.
The Mobile World
We’re well into the 2020s: any intranet needs a mobile option that’s more than just a responsive version of the desktop. The mobile intranet should be native to both Apple and Android devices and allow for push notifications and the rendering of content in a way that, like a desktop version, is easy to navigate, intuitive and familiar. Don’t ignore your mobile experience. In today’s workplace, mobile is just another channel for delivering communications. Even among workers who use desktop or laptop computers, mobile may be the first platform they reach for to consume content — and that’s not even getting to the 3 billion global employees who don’t sit at desks and only have mobile access.
The mobile screen is of course much smaller, and we therefore need to be very deliberate with how broad categories of content are designed and displayed . The mobile design goal comes down to one overarching principle: Anything an employee will want to have access to must be reachable from the home screen of the device. That means without any scrolling action and reachable with one or two taps, maximum. When an employee opens a mobile intranet application on their device, it should basically be: what you see is what you get. Although some content won’t necessarily be reachable from the home screen at first glance, the top categories all absolutely need to be accessible from the home screen.
Mobile Design
There are three primary areas on a mobile employee intranet app where the designated top-level content categories should be reachable. First, there’s the bottom navigation where you can have buttons to quickly take employees into a content category with a single tap. In many apps, you can also include a side-navigation “hamburger” icon that, when tapped, expands to list content categories. It’s also possible to use buttons or tiles on the top portion of a landing screen, similar to desktop intranet design.
But before we can arrange our content categories on screen, we first need to prioritize them. This should be a fairly simple exercise. You just need to know what employees care about the most when it comes to the content they expect to have as part of their intranet. Assuming you know this — or at least have a good hunch — after all of our previous steps, you just need to assign a number to each top level content category, starting with 1:
When prioritizing content, do your best to put yourself in the shoes of the typical end-user employee and don’t be tainted by your subjective view of what content is more important.
Learning Opportunities
Related Article: Digital Workplace Complexity is Slowing Down Your Workforce
Designing and Leveraging Features and Functionality
There are three key principles to stick to when designing corporate intranets: simplicity, familiarity and ease of access.
- Simplicity: While design aesthetics are important, there is no reason to overthink and be excessively creative when designing an intranet. Yes, it should look nice and be inviting — but not at the expense of keeping the design and architecture simple. Just deliver content in an easy to consume way — no more than one or two clicks on a desktop intranet or one or two taps on a mobile device.
- Familiarity: If you’re replacing an existing intranet, don’t stray too far. We don’t want employees to freak out when they access the new intranet for the first time. People don’t like change, so try to minimize it if possible. When it comes to a mobile employee app, think about Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram — people already expect buttons on the bottom of the app that require a single tap to access; a newsfeed that provides current information on top and older information below that they can search for if needed. Make the experience familiar and, again, straightforward.
- Ease of Access: Employees just want to be able to access what they need to know, quickly! As always, no more than one or two clicks on a desktop intranet or taps on a mobile device.
The images below demonstrate how broad content categories, once defined and prioritized, come to life to ensure a Simple, Familiar and Easy employee intranet end-user experience.
These three principles are really all a non-tech savvy professional needs to design and oversee a corporate intranet. Given the various solutions that exist in the employee communications application tech industry, the complexity behind the scenes should be left for the tech development companies to deal with.
Any good intranet solution should come with extensive feature and functionality sets that make for a simple, familiar and excellent employee end-user experience — and one that was developed with communications professionals in mind from the administrative/management point of view. Tech vendors should be able to provide strategic advice throughout the process in addition to the desired features and functionality, such as native chat functionality, calendaring and event modules, employee directories, onboarding journey modules, analytics and an intuitive and comprehensive search function.
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About the Author
Jeff Corbin has worked as a communications consultant for more than 20 years. Passionate about transforming internal communications through the use of technology, he was the founder and CEO of APPrise Mobile where he pioneered the use of mobile technology in the United States with respect to a new category of technology — employee apps.
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