Intranet diary

GovIntranet beta release 3

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 02 Nov 2013 13:22:00 +0000

The latest major release of GovIntranet is available in beta on GitHub. Find out what's new.

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Relevanssi WordPress plugin: intranet search comparisons

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 05 Oct 2013 17:01:00 +0000

Two intranets. Both built in WordPress. Very different search experience.

Intranet CMS compare and contrast

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 17:49:00 +0000

I've been reminiscing over my time working on the Justice intranet and it got me thinking about the differences between the hoops and obstacles that I used to have to put up with compared to some of the standard issue features of using WordPress as a CMS today.

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One year on

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 08:47:00 +0000

I've been at Helpful Technology a year this week, so thought it would be an opportune time to dredge myself out of the wilderness to blog about what I've been up to.
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Intranet WordPress theme now on GitHub

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 14 May 2013 08:00:00 +0000

As promised, we've published the code for the WordPress theme based on the DCMS intranet.

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DCMS intranet uncovered

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:20:00 +0000

DCMS continue to follow the GDS design principles as the new intranet goes into beta this week. It's not finished yet. It's not 100% perfect. And it's available for staff to use and provide their feedback.

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An intranet inspired by GOV.UK

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 09:10:00 +0000

I started the new year by kicking off an intranet project with the very switched-on digital comms team at DCMS who wanted the next iteration of their intranet to follow the GDS design principles.

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Five months outside the Civil Service

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 10:29:00 +0000

I'm 5 months into my new job and the projects that I started working on are coming to fruition, with several bubbling away in the background, including a very interesting government department intranet project.
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Network visualisation: what does your #intranet really look like?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 19:33:00 +0000

Ask most people what their intranet looks like and they'll describe their intranet homepage. But what does your intranet, your internal network, really look like?
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Guide to creating effective intranet news stories

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 12:24:00 +0000

Textual and graphical aspects of intranet news stories, including writing online content, search engine optimisation (SEO) and image optimisation.

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Tracking offline comms channels in Google Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 09:02:00 +0000

When it comes to evaluating staff communication campaigns, we have to look at both online and offline channels. Using Google Analytics campaign tracking we can capture activity on the intranet as a result of clicks in emails and documents that are sent out to staff.

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If I were an internal communicator...

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 13:20:00 +0000

Across the whole organisation there is a massive transformation programme running to save money and improve services. It's been cooking since before the spending review in various guises. Internal campaigns having come and gone and are making a comeback. How successful will they be this time?

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Luke to join Helpful Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 09:11:00 +0000

After nearly five years at MoJ, it's au revoir as I plan to move on from the Civil Service to join Steph Gray at Helpful Technology in the role of Client Service Director.
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12 signs of an untrained intranet publisher

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 09:00:00 +0000

Here are some common signs that your site content has been written by someone who has never been trained how to write for an online audience and is unaware of search engine optimisation or visitors using accessible technology.
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#SWCONF 2012, intranet diary debrief

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 27 May 2012 14:09:00 +0000

I remember stumbling upon #SWCONF on Twitter last year and getting hooked on the live tweets. This year I attended in person to find out what all the buzz was about.

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System status and vanity intranet pages

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 26 May 2012 17:16:00 +0000

One of my favourite metrics when measuring improvement on the intranet is the number of calls to the helpdesk. It's a sure sign of success when you've done a few changes to an area of the intranet and the number of helpdesk calls goes down.
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Social media guidelines and the workplace

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 20 May 2012 19:02:00 +0000

GDS and the Home Office released their Social Media Guidelines for Civil Servants on 17th May. With introductions from Francis Maude and Sir Bob Kerslake, I'm hoping that this backing will help to support changes in policy for using social media channels and platforms within the workplace.

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"One Intranet" project

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 13 May 2012 16:42:00 +0000

Fresh on the horizon for me is the "One Intranet" project that will merge intranets from many organisations into one with a vision of saving money and improving efficiency. This is a great opportunity to rethink the intranet within the workplace and to put in place some governance and strategy around content.
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Mobile usability: Usability Week day 1

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 22:39:00 +0000

Just got back from day 1 of Usability Week in Edinburgh. Thumbs up for todays session on designing websites for mobile usability, by Amy Schade, who got us through 188 slides and kept it fascinating all the way.

I've been working in the field of usability and user experience for over 10 years now but I don't have much professional usability experience when it comes to mobile. Today's session was informative and useful. I've come away brimming with ideas and also feeling a little chuffed at how we have done with our freshly released version of the website which has been designed for mobile users in mind. I was a little concerned about whether we had made the right choices with some points in the mobile design. But after today I feel that we've made a very good start in getting the website into the mobile arena.

Homepage hub

Responsive design
The choices when designing a mobile website are whether to do nothing and let your website look exactly the same but smaller on a mobile phone, to go for a full-on and separate mobile version of the site or to use responsive design which allows pages to reformat themselves depending on the device used to view them. Of course, there are apps and web apps - but we're talking websites here. We opted for responsive design so that we can repurpose the same website on desktop, tablet and smartphone devices. This is convenient for us, with limited resources for maintaining several different versions of a website. But on the down side, it does mean that some content remains in the full-website format, when it could be cut down for mobile reading.

From the start of the website redesign project we wanted to retain the ability to view the full website on a mobile phone, in addition to the responsive design version. So it's good to know that this is recommended for mobile sites. But we have positioned the link at the top of the page and it's recommended to go at the bottom - which makes sense as it's not one of the most important things fighting for space at the top.

Navigation
There are 3 popular ways to approach navigation on the homepage of mobile sites; a menu button that expands, a horizontal navigation bar or a homepage hub approach; or a combination of these. We went for the homepage hub approach which lists the main site options on the homepage and is appropriate for sites that have deeper structures with varying topics of content and task-oriented sites. It means that you have to return to the homepage to start looking at another topic or task, which is fine for our users who typically use discrete areas of the site.

Menu link skips to navigation
at bottom of page

I was keen to find out if our treatment of regular navigation throughout the rest of the site had been done well. We use a "Menu" link at the top of every page which skips to the menu navigation situated at the bottom of the page. There is a "Top" link situated with this navigation block at the bottom which returns you to the top. This technique was first seen in accessible websites to allow users to jump around the page between navigation and textual content and it's nice to see the technique used again, showing yet again that designing for accessibility makes for helpful navigation for all types of users. And according to NN/g this is an appropriate application of navigation because it promotes content at the top of the mobile page and still allows people to quickly navigate through the site.

User testing
There was also a session on user testing of mobile websites which gave me some good tips such as how to go about recording testing sessions, what equipment to use and how to avoid pitfalls like recording someone using a mobile phone only to find that all you've recorded is the glare from an overhead light on the surface of the phone.

Mobile-optimised prison finder

Future development
There is more that we can do to the mobile version of the website in terms of flattening navigation structures and minimising clicks (or taps). And maybe even a case for developing web apps for some of the more popular areas that are used by mobile users - things like contacts, job search, find a prison, maps and localised content provision.

I'm very much looking forward to the rest of the week when I'm attending a few more tutorials on mobile and touch, plus some more psychological learnings.

A/B tests on user group signup adverts

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 11:30:00 +0000

To recruit people to our user group we ran a display advert on the website. I created an A/B test using 4 different adverts. One of them was a runaway winner.

The aim of the advert was to encourage people who use the website to signup and become part of the user group. I tested the baseline against 3 variants on other popular pages throughout the website. The baseline advert ran all the time on the homepage but the homepage is not our most visited page, with just 3% of total site visits, compared to our jobs page at 11%. So the A/B testing ran on the A-Z, contacts, forms and jobs pages as well as several other popular content areas of the site.

Here are the contenders:

Baseline

Variety 1

Variety 2

Variety 3

Baseline [blue] The baseline advert was a text box with simple content and a clear call to action.

Variety 1 [yellow] The first variety of the advert was a graphic, showing the website homepage and touting the user group. Wording in the advert hit on the senses (take part, view, hear) and the text was centralised.

Variety 2 [orange] The second variety was similar to the first with the same wording but used a photo of a test tube. The wording was left-justified.

Variety 3 [green] The third variety was text-based, carefully-designed to appear like a badly-written personals ad clipped from a newspaper.

After running the test for a few days I removed one of the poor-performing varieties. After 9 days, I removed the remaining poor-performing advert and ran a follow-up test with the baseline advert and the likely winner. The total test took 12 days.

Click to enlarge

The results were conclusive, almost from the start of the test. The personals ad outperformed the other adverts with a conversion rate of 1.33%. According to Google Website Optimizer, this winning advert had a 99.9% chance of outperforming all the others. The baseline was the closest contender with a 0.48% conversion rate.

This is another test that shows how plain text beats graphic content and how users are often blind to snazzy, photographic advertising. On this occasion, both text-based adverts outperformed the photographic adverts. One could still argue that the winning advert is a graphic. But it only depicts words and characters, with a dirty grey background.

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Google Analytics Realtime intranet statistics

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:23:00 +0000

Since Google introduced realtime analytics, we have been heavily, almost addictively, using this new toy to gain new insights into how staff are using the intranet.

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Could this be the start of a social intranet?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 21:32:00 +0000

It's 5 o'clock on Friday afternoon, the day after our office Christmas party and I'm very much looking forward to going home. Just as I'm packing my things away I'm approached by one of the comms team...

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GovDelivery email alerts and newsletter management

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:24:00 +0000

Back in July we ditched using Google Feedburner in favour of GovDelivery to manage our website email alerts and group newsletters.

Feedburner allowed us to manage subscriptions with automated email alerts based on RSS feeds. We could get basic stats on subscribers, views and clicks. But Feedburner didn't do newsletters and it only monitored RSS feeds. With GovDelivery we got a whole new box of tricks.

First let me tell you a bit about the company. They're based in the States. They specialise in Government. They're relatively new in the UK. And in my experience the staff have been very helpful in getting us going with the new system.

I received online training, live from the States. And with help from GovDelivery staff, I was able to get the system setup and customised pretty quick.

The switch-over went smoothly and we managed to turn off the old system and launch the new system in a few clicks.

User interface
The system is a bit clunky. The language is American. So what I call a "newsletter", they call an "advanced bulletin". The user interface is not the most modern. I didn't spot whole areas of navigation until after having used the system for a few weeks! But once you get used to it you can do some useful stuff.

Email alerts
GovDelivery does all that Feedburner did for us. We use the same RSS feeds for news, publications and consultations. These feeds trigger automatic email alerts when we add new items. But in addition to monitoring RSS feeds, GovDelivery has a "page watch" system that can monitor HTML pages for changes. We have used this feature to offer subscriptions to more specialised content where the emphasis has been on offering alerts when something has changed, as opposed to alerts for something new. And because you don't always want to tell the world when you have corrected a typo, system administrators get an email asking whether or not they want to send out an alert based on a change to the page. This makes the process more manual and labour-intensive but this depends on how often changes occur.

Newsletters
You can send out manual "bulletins" in the form of a quick, text-based email, or a full-on designed newsletter. There is a lot of flexibility in being able to target subscribers such as sending to people who subscribed within a specified date range or to a specific group of email addresses or a filter on user-defined fields which subscribers are invited to complete when signing-up. This ability to send out ad-hoc messages to subscribers was something that Feedburner lacked. So we are also using the system to manage newsletter mailing lists and user groups.

Optimised sign-up process
One of the clever ways of encouraging people to subscribe to a variety of topics is that they see a complete list of available topics when they sign-up. With feedburner, they only got to see the initial topic that they requested. Let me illustrate:

When you subscribe with Feedburner you get a confirmation page.

Feedburner

When you subscribe with GovDelivery you get a choice of the complete range of topics on offer, available in nested and expandable lists. This technique has increased the number of alerts that people subscribe to when they sign-up.

GovDelivery

And to further increase subscriptions, GovDelivery cross-promotes other organisations.

GovDelivery cross-promotion

The result is an overall increase in subscribers and the number of topics that they subscribe to when they sign-up. This was evident when one of our associated organisations cranked up nearly 50 subscribers before they officially announced their new alert service.

Reports
GovDelivery offers 8 standard reports detailing subscribers, alert topics and analytics on sent items and clicks, including clicks on links within the emails. The reports are very much raw dumps of data, but you can export the data to do more detailed analysis or create your own graphs elsewhere. And you can get detailed information throughout the system, for example if I click into one of my alert topics, I can then get a report of subscribers for that topic or a report showing every time the alert has been sent.

Customisation
Because there are many organisations that fall within the umbrella of the ministry, it was important for us that we could customise alerts and newsletters for individual organisations. The system now contains alerts for 4 different organisations and apart from the initial subscription and sign-up emails (which are branded with our agnostic umbrella logo,) all alerts are individually branded.

The newsletter interface comes loaded with various pre-formatted design templates and the drag-and-drop interface makes it easy for non-developers to create great-looking HTML newsletters. And for those of us who do know HTML, you can do that too.

You can upload images and make them reusable for future newsletters, and even lock them down so that they are only available in specific newsletter templates.

Administration
We've now got a meaty offering of alert topics within the system and the administration interface allows you to create logins for additional users. You can lock down access to individual alert topics and there are several levels of user-type. This gives a good deal of flexibility in controlling access and devolved publishing responsibilities.

Results
I am very impressed with the service that the system offers to our user base, and with the service that I have received from staff at GovDelivery. The number of subscribers to our alerts is steadily on the rise and I hope to be able to help more of our organisations in launching their email alert and newsletter services.

Links

Content interaction vs content generation

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 08:23:00 +0000

Terms like social intranet and intranet 2.0 used to make me think "Facebook at work" (or indeed Google+ these days.) And that could be cool. But I ask myself "how connected are the people who work in the very different parts of our organisation?"

Intranet documents are not Russian dolls

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 09:49:00 +0000

Embedding and interlinking documents within other documents on the intranet creates a doll-inside-a-doll effect making it difficult for people to find the information that they want.

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