Effective usability testing for Intranet

Intranet plays a vital role in informing and empowering employees. But surprisingly, many companies still do not pay enough attention to the usefulness and usability of their intranet. Testing the usability of intranet needs a different approach than evaluating internet websites.

Problems can have a different nature and testing employees is different because respondents feel evaluated by colleagues. When conducting a usability test on the intranet, it is important to pay extra attention to the process and methodology.

Process

1. Recruitment

Recruiting employees as respondents for an intranet usability test asks for a different approach. Possible difficulties:

1. Employees have the tendency to prefer other meetings, due to this, the chance of last minute cancelling and no shows is higher;
2. Employees are not willing to participate - afraid of being judged by colleagues;
3. Organisations arrange the recruitment by themselves, forgetting that recruitment is a professional business;
4. Employees do not belong to one homogeneous group, therefore more respondents from different groups are necessary.

For this reason it is important to realise that the recruitment of respondents for the intranet takes more time and effort than you should expect.

Tips

• Consider to put the recruitment under contract by a specialised recruitment organisation;
•  Consider to recruit extra employees than required, to make sure you have enough respondents;
•  Select respondents according to multiple selection criteria. For instance: newcomer or not, function level (e.g. staff or manager), type of function (e.g. commercial, communication or support) and if the person is working at the office or being on the way.

2.  Field work and communicating results

Theoretically, field work is most realistic at the location of the organisation. At the employees working space you create a realistic surf situation. But there are practical issues: you need a mobile test lab and employees need a relaxed environment. This because employees will be afraid of being judged by colleagues and have more the tendency to be ashamed when they do not know the answers.
The anonymity of the respondents is an essential issue when doing a usability test, so be cautious when communicating the results.

Usability test session

Tip

Consider which aspects are more important when deciding where to accomplish the usability test:

• At the location of the organisation you get a more realistic surf situation, especially when the employees are sitting behind their own desks;
•  At an other location, either in a conference room or an external usability lab, employees can feel less judged, more comfortable and you have the technical advantage of a professional lab.

Methodology

3. Content

The primary goals of the intranet are informing employees and sharing knowledge within the organization. For this reason the content of the intranet is very important. But, in many cases the content is out-of-date and inaccurate, the level of content varies greatly between sections or the content is not interesting for every type of visitor. Often reasons for this are:

1. The content is filled by different departments which are separately responsible for the input;
2. The text is written from the point of view of the organization instead of the users;
3. The intranet is for everyone the same, without the possibility of personalization.

Tips

• Consider a content analysis to evaluate the text content of the website and to see if the texts have the requested effect;
•  When conducting a content analysis, realize that the amount of the content is often large. Therefore, be selective.

4. Navigation structure

The navigation structure often reflects in a certain degree the organizational structure. For users this is not always the most practical structure to order it. Other problems are that the used names are often linked to internal projects, which are not known by everyone and the lack of cross-links between the different sections. These problems have influence on the following results:

1. Users have considerable difficulties with finding the required information;
2. Users follow different paths to information;
3. Users get ‘lost’, they are not sure how to get back to a previous step or do not know where they are on the intranet.

To prevent many of these problems, design the navigation structure from the point of view of the user instead of the organization. You can do this by a card sorting exercise.

Card sorting session

Tip

• The card sorting method can help to get confident with the best site’s structure. Users will help to determine the structure of the new intranet using cards containing intranet objects placed together. This will provide an input for the navigation of the intranet, and will guarantee that visitors quickly and easily find content components in the future.

Conclusion
The four issues discussed above are very important to consider when accomplishing a usability test. But not everything can be solved with a usability test. A successful launch of the intranet also depends on the fact if employees are aware of the information their intranet can offer them and if employees know which information is provided.

To prevent that some employees visit the intranet only incidentally, it is good to give (starters) intranet-training. Tell them how to use the intranet and which role intranet can accomplish. Furthermore trigger employees to visit the intranet with a newsletter and/or alert service.