لطفا منتظر باشید ...
Chapter 6: Designing Your Intranet to be Useful - Usability and Information Architecture
Overview
Author: Inigo Surguy
The useful intranet
User testing
Practical usability techniques
In Chapters 3, 4 and 5, we've discussed some of the technology involved in creating an intranet. In this chapter, we'll take a step back from the technology and focus on the problems that users will face when using the intranet and how to solve them.The problems that we'll be looking at in this chapter are:
If you have an existing intranet, how to identify and fix its usability problems
If you're starting from scratch, how to use iterative design to identify usability problems
How to increase the usability of intranet navigation
How to improve intranet search usability
How to make the intranet fast to use
To tackle these problems, we'll take a user-centered approach. This means focusing on the aspects of the intranet that are important for the user, rather than the intranet developers or authors. The purpose of an intranet is to support users in the performance of their jobs, so it is vital to actively involve the users in the development and testing of the intranet.We'll look at ways of considering the needs of your users in the design process, and of testing your intranet to see whether it meets those needs. We'll discuss justifying the costs of usability, and then go on to look at some specific intranet techniques and when they should be used.
| Note | Usability is about making a product - in this case your intranet - easy to use. It's not just about making it easy to learn for someone who hasn't seen it before; it is also about making it efficient to use for someone who uses it frequently.A more formal definition is provided by the ISO standard for usability, ISO 13407: "The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use". Unfortunately, ISO standards are not freely available online, but you can purchase them from http://www.iso.org/.Information Architecture sounds very academic, but it's essentially about organizing your intranet so people can find the information they are looking for.There is a lot of overlap between usability and information architecture; in this chapter we'll take a practical approach and handle them together as one field instead of distinguishing between the two. |
