I can't believe I'm saying this but...

September 03, 2002 | 0 Comments

…THANK YOU JAKOB NIELSEN.

In his September 3rd Alertbox, Jacob gives voice to my pain with our intranet redesign.

I’m really feeling this portion:

Long Development Times, But No Big Bang

Most of the winning projects spent about two years on their intranet redesigns. This is an important lesson for companies and cautions against exaggerated hopes for instant gratification. For a big company, it’s a big project to redesign an intranet and roll out a consistent design across all divisions. Great intranet usability and employee productivity require more work than just adding water to some portal software.

Even though the full process can take about two years, our winning projects did not hold off until everything was perfect before releasing the new intranets to an unsuspecting public. Some companies had been burned before by “big bang” development projects that took forever to create a hoped-for solution to all problems in a single, delayed release. Instead, all of the winning companies followed a staged approach, gradually releasing new templates, portals, search engines, personalization features, and other components of the full intranet.

Also, the central design teams typically aimed at converting individual departments to the new design one at a time, rather than asking everyone to change all of their pages all at once. A big bang would be an impossible strategy considering the size of these intranets…

And it doesn’t stop there. I think I’ll be getting the full report. I read the last report he did on intranets and found it very informative.

Filed under: Web General