Introduction:

It is true that organizations need Intranet portals to keep track of their internal activities and processes. Companies build intranets for improving internal communications, distributing information and enabling more employees to access legacy data. This is something that their employees are going to rely on for carrying out further processes. Hence, the thing that matters the most in creating intranet ideas is its user experience (UX).

Sometimes, it becomes critical for companies to manage the intranet user experience. Merely to understand employees as all are of different perspectives and backgrounds, motivating them, keeping them engaged, monitoring their performances becomes a challenging task for organizations. Here arises the process of UX development to cope up with these challenging tasks.

Challenges:

Let’s have a look on the challenges that organizations face while implementing Intranet.

• Defining the purpose of Intranet-

  Understanding the role of intranet alongside other business communication tools is of utmost importance. Defining the purpose of intranet is one of the challenging task organizations are facing. As without purpose, there is no strategic direction to built intranet website.

• Identifying the needs of Intranet Users.

  Without identifying the needs of intranet users, there won’t be any purpose to built site as per user experience. It becomes difficult to answer what exactly users want from intranet.

• Providing Genuine Service to the Users.

  The other challenge comes around is providing genuine services to the users. The lack of consistent global proposition could result in multiple intranets having been developed, each with a disparate look and feel, resulting in complexity and subsequent user negativity. The site won’t be user oriented anymore.

• Maintaining the control of the intranet experience, whilst allowing innovation and local control.

  Then arises a concern of maintaining the control of intranet experience. As the site needs to be innovative and interactive, the use of templates must be chosen wisely. Also care needs to be taken to ensure that selected technology platform enables the creation of flexible templates, with the ability to easily add new templates, as required.

Strategies

To tackle challenges in Intranet, the essential thing is UX development. Now let’s throw light on some of the strategies that states how to improve UX design.

• Set a Strategic Direction-

  Initially establish a core strategy for the intranet that serves the purposes of building intranet. Set objectives and goals to be achieved through intranet website. Knowing the purpose and needs will provide a strategic direction to build an intranet website.

• Understand the behavior of Intranet users-

  As intranet is for the internal users of the organizations, so understanding their behavior is necessary. It can be done by observing users actions and collect relevant data that can be used to create a better user experience in building intranet website.

• Refine the quality and interactive content for the website-

  Content is the core of intranet websites. Hence, drafting a quality and interactive content is must. It can be done by carrying out content audit, as it has many advantages. Rewrite the content that lacks quality. The care must be taken that content should not be outdated. Restructure and merge the relevant information. Delete the data that is irrelevant.

• Test with real Users-

  To gain in-depth analysis of the website, it must be tested with real users. It can help organizations to point out the relevant and irrelevant features of the website. Testing intranets is way easier, and much more affordable

• Monitor the performance of the site visitors-

  To provide improved UX design, the performance of the site visitors must be monitored in order to carry out necessary corrections. Track top search terms for pages where searchers arrive. After completing task performance targets, prioritize efforts by monitoring task-based data from analytics, identifying areas for improvement. Know how to extract task data from web analytics, as generic web analytics are typically not designed to monitor user tasks.

Conclusion

Building a strategic and purposeful intranet website depends on user experience. Thus, UX design plays a vital role in implementing an intranet website.

BluEnt is one of the leading UX and development consultants for intranet websites. It recommends the best possible solutions for its customers own tailor-made intranet portal. Be it intranet application development or community portals development, it has collected relevant experience in serving it.

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