Why your company’s Intranet needs a better UX
As a CTO, your CEO tells you that your company intranet site needs to be revamped. Or maybe your company is now large enough that it needs its own intranet. This is something your employees are going to use often so you put your best people to work on it. And so begins the sometimes fruitful, but often arduous process of getting stakeholders to decide what and how the intranet should be. Be forewarned, it can get tricky as you brainstorm with people across geographies, time zones, professions, and cultures.
When the job is done, a majority of the stakeholders are in agreement over wireframes or a first design mock-up. Everything seems to be great, right? Well, no. There is one problem and a major one at that. The one stakeholder that should have been front and center never gets a foot in — your employees. The result: You have now built a site where the user experience (UX) essentially is, to put it mildly, suboptimal.
Don’t think UX for an intranet site is a big deal? It is, and if you factor it in while planning the site, you might end up having happier employees, innumerable man years saved and yes, it actually will cost you less in the long run.
So, here is why your intranet site needs an awesome user experience:
1. Your employees expect a consumer grade user experience
In their lives outside work, your employees constantly engage with devices and applications with superb user experiences. Be it using their phones, tabs, apps, their Amazon echo, their Nest thermometer, almost everything is in business because all of these have great UX. Your employees are used to — and expect — a consumer-grade user experience. So, imagine stepping off that dreamland and then coming to work and struggling to navigate your company intranet site. Totally not cool.
2. Your employees will love it
Now imagine your intranet does have an amazing UX. Your employees love it and go to it often. Your analytics data will go through the roof. Your employees will love it. How cool is that? And that gives the management an opportunity to communicate the vision clearly and repeatedly and hey, it’ll work, because your employees actually use the site extensively.
3. Employees will feel that you care
With a great UX in place, your employees feel it in their bones that the company cares for them. Often, the company does truly care about its people and the ‘Our people are our strength’ slogans are actually truths but often, especially as companies become larger, processes add up and it becomes harder to get things done. A great UX for your intranet can communicate unequivocally that yes we do care about you, dear employees, and, yes, we are trying our best.
4. Great UX comes from superior user research. The result, you come to know your employees better
A great user experience needs user research. Analytics data helps, but it can often show only what worked in the past or what is the easiest to do. User research will bring up insights that can be truly surprising. This is a data gold mine of the best kind — one that will bring your employees and the company closer.
5. Thousands of man hours saved
Every time employees struggle around an intranet site with poor user experience, they are wasting time. The time of your employees — probably the most valuable resource at your disposal — is getting wasted. Imagine all the thousands of man hours that add up to over the years.
I’ll leave you with Steve Jobs, who explained it best:
How many people are going to be using the Macintosh? A million? No, more than that. In a few years, I bet five million people will be booting up their Macintosh's at least once a day. Well, let’s say you can save 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and that’s 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that’s probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you’ve saved a dozen lives.
That’s really worth it, don’t you think?
- Steve Jobs to Larry Kenyon of the original Mac team, 1983
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