Fiona caldwell presentation

Creating and maintaining a usable intranetFiona Caldwell, Tatts Group

Agenda

• Introduction

• Who is Tatts Group & who am I

• History of our Intranet

• Useful & Usable Intranets

• Identifying usability issues

• Maintaining Intranet Content

Tatts Group

• Provider of gaming, wagering and lottery leisure and entertainment products and services.

• Brands include TattsLotto, Golden Casket, NSW Lotteries, TattsBet (previously Unitab), Tatts Pokies, Maxgaming, Bytecraft, and Centre Racing in Australia, and Talarius in the UK.

• Originated in 1881 when founder George Adams organized a public sweep on the Sydney Cup horse race, and in 1897 it began operating the first government-endorsed lottery.

• 2,500 employees across Australia and UK

About Me

• Group Manager, Business Systems at Tatts Group.

• Wide portfolio – Projects and support for:

• Corporate Systems (Intranet, Phone Book, Collaboration Tools)

• Shared Services Systems (eg Finance and HR systems, CRM systems, Marketing systems, Service Management and Call Centre systems)

• Middleware

• Business Process Automation

• Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence

• Database Administration.

• Specialties: Applications Management, Intranets, Business Intelligence and Information Management

Our Intranet Team

Team Leader

SharePoint Admin x 1

Content Manager x 1

Developer x 3 (Workflow/.Net)

• 6 team members

• SharePoint 2007

• Key Projects:

• SharePoint 2010 upgrade

• Forms automation / workflow

Journey of Tatts Group Intranet

2003

Basic Information Portal

- List of Hyperlinks- News

Lotus Notes

Owner: Technology


2005

Generation I: Basic Intranet - Corporate Information- Basic HR information- Links to applications- Team Sites- Project Sites

SharePoint 2003

Owner: Technology


2007

Generation II: Corporate Intranet- Corporate Colours- Corporate Information- Noticeboard- More HR information- Links to applications- Team Sites- Project Sites

SharePoint 2007

Owner: HR


2009

Generation III: HR Centric Intranet- HR Focused- Colour themed areas- More images- Home Page Focus on HR:

• New starters• Learning & Development• Employee Services

- Communities- MyWorkCentre:

• Personal Profile• Personal Site• Personalised Information

- Some Application Integration

SharePoint 2007

Owner: HR


2011

Generation IV: Task Focused Intranet- Electronic Forms- Integrated Workflow & Approvals- Areas colour themed - Personal and Team Sites

SharePoint 2010

Owner: HR

Useful & Usable

• Professional appearance

• Consistent design & layout across different areas

• Standard page templates

• Consistent font, navigation, graphic design, page structure.

• Easily distinguishable from public facing website

• Ease of finding information

• Effectiveness of search engine

• Ease of use of processes

• Cross links between different sections of the site

• Content up to date

• Information you cant get anywhere else

• Level of content detail consistent between sections

• Content owners actively managing content & don’t require HMTL knowledge

• No bottlenecks in publishing process

• Accessibility

• Interactive features

• Getting your intranet used is not just about marketing and promotion – need to make sure intranet is useful & usable:

Finding out user needs

• Intranets are one of the most valuable assets for any large organisation. They can help people do their jobs better and more efficiently.

• Poor usability = Poor efficiency

• Techniques to find out usability issues and user needs:

• Stakeholder Interviews (Ask)

• Walk through key tasks (Try)

• Review Logs & Feedback (Review)

• Usability Tests (Observe)


• Stakeholder Interviews (one-on-one):

• Discuss what their job involves and how they currently use (or don’t use) the intranet – ask them to show you.

• You may learn about:

• Work-arounds for tasks

• Different paths staff follow to information (navigation, search)

• Parts of the screen or information that staff miss

• Areas of the intranet that staff don’t understand

• Sections of the intranet that staff don’t know exist

• Discuss future intranet requirements to support work needs.


• Walk through key tasks:

• Prepare an extensive set of scenarios – what tasks do staff attempt on the intranet?

• User Stories: As a <role> I Want <some Business Functionality> So That <Some Business Value or Justification>. The acceptance criteria describes the criteria by which stakeholders will determine whether the product meets their needs – in this case tasks that need to be completed.

• Eg. As an employee I want to book travel so that I can travel to Brisbane next week. Acceptance Criteria:

• I need to know what forms need to be filled out request travel

• I need to seek approval

• I need to book travel and accommodation

• I need to find out where our Brisbane office is located

• I need to know about cab charges, what else I can claim back as expenses and how to claim expenses. Etc…


• Walk through key tasks (contd):

• Identify all activities that make up the task

• What needs to be done to complete a task?

• What actions are inside the intranet or outside the intranet?

• Walk through the scenario (yourself or with the team).

• Pay attention to the decisions you make and the reasons for your decisions. For example, do you choose a particular navigation because you already know where the information is? Do you use search? How else could the same task be done?

• Look for content that may need to be reorganised or grouped with other content.


• Review logs and feedback

• Look for patterns in logs and feedback:

• Frequently accessed pages: What pages are accessed most frequently?

• Search logs: What terms are users typing into the intranet?

• Page Feedback Links: What feedback is being received?

• Help Desk Requests: What are the common questions and requests?

• Use patterns found to:

• Create scenarios (user stories) for task walk throughs

• Add quick links to home page for frequent actions

• Remove content that is not needed

• Create content that doesn’t exist


• Observing staff using the intranet (usability test)

• Create realistic scenarios to evaluate core tasks

• Recruit participants that are representative of the user group

• Observe the participants attempting the scenarios

• Note what happens

• Look for repeated behaviours – if a problem occurs multiple times then its worth investigating

• Key difference between this and stakeholder interviews is that all participants working through the same scenarios.

Maintaining Content

• To make sure Intranet is useful, need to maintain current, accurate and reliable content. This is not easy:• More and more information to maintain

• Growth in pages

• Growth in volumes of information

• ‘Knowledge experts’ are busy doing their ‘real’ jobs

• To keep Intranet content up to date, consider:• Authoring and Publishing Models

• Easy to use Content Management System

• Training & Support

• Regular communications

• Content Reviews

• Action user feedback

Maintaining Content

• Consider authoring and publishing models used:• Fully centralised

• Decentralised

• Publishing with review

• Federated publishing

• End-user content contribution

• No one model is right – mix and match different models:• Corporate Information: Mostly Centralised (controlled by HR,

Technology). Limited areas anyone can update (Noticeboard, Events, Team Profiles, Corporate Glossary of Terms)

• Team Sites (Teams, Projects, Communities): End-user content - anyone can request and maintain.

• Personal Site: Auto creation for all employees and basic data population. User generated content - update own profiles

• Dedicated content manager in Intranet Team

Maintaining Content

• Easy to use Content Management System:

• Provide a style guide – but don’t expect people to read it

• Use templates and style sheets for consistent formatting

• Provide spell checking functionality

• Use workflow to manage content approvals (if needed)

• Add review and expiry dates to content

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Maintaining Content

• Continual training, support and guidelines• All employees are potentially content authors

• Different levels of training is required for different needs

• Employee Induction:• Induction eLearning provides introduction to Intranet

• Quick Tours highlight where all employees can contribute

• Online Help • Overviews, Quick Tours, Quick Ref Guides, Governance, where to

store information, how to write for the web, FAQs

• Formal Training• Content Contributors: Roles & responsibilities, CMS basic features

(eg. SharePoint document libraries and lists, revision control, etc)

• Site Owners: Roles and responsibilities, CMS advanced features (eg. Creating SharePoint sites, managing permissions, etc)

Maintaining Content

• Communicate, Communicate, Communicate:

• Community of Power Users

• Regular Emails / Newsletters

• Monthly Newsletters, Tips and Tricks

• Regular Content Reviews

• Target highest value content – don’t try and fix everything!

• Remove redundant, out dated, or trivial content

• Intranet Feedback

• Provide feedback mechanism on all pages

• Address feedback in timely manner (or you will stop getting feedback)