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Web portals have suffered a highly variable existence. Every few years, they’re in, and every few years, they’re out, with many of last season’s darlings filing for bankruptcy. It’s a different story inside companies: enterprise portals only know one way, and it's up. With each passing year, more and more companies get intranet portals, while those with established portals keep improving their features and usability.
An intranet portal is the one gateway that unifies access to all enterprise information and applications. In reality, some things often still live outside the portal, but at a minimum, the portal ought to organize everything that’s accessible on the intranet. Portals can help employees find information more easily and perform their jobs better, though few portal designs are optimal just out-of-the-box. In fact, especially in smaller companies, designers can realize some features found in off-the-shelf portal software through simpler (do-it-yourself) means. Regardless, at all the companies we studied, the key issues when building a good intranet portal were political and organizational—not technical. Hence just buying portal software doesn’t guarantee a good portal; you must also manage internal company politics. Indeed, back-of-the-envelope math from successful portal launches suggests technology accounts for roughly one-third of the work, and internal processes account for the rest. |
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Three Research Rounds |
This report presents findings from our third round of assessing usability issues for intranet portals. The report also integrates the findings from the first two rounds. In fact, one of the main findings of the new research is that all our best-practice recommendations from the past rounds continue to hold.
User experience recommendations change more slowly than almost anything else in the technology field, because user experience is based on human characteristics. For the latest round of research, we collected case studies from 23 companies and organizations. When supplemented by the insights from the 25 companies and organizations that were included in the two earlier research rounds, this means that the report is based on analyses of 48 intranet portals. (We base some of our analysis on additional reports received from several anonymous informants who are known to us but need to keep their identity private.) When reading the report, you will notice a number of screenshots from earlier-round portals as well as interview quotes from members of those portal teams. We retained this information for several reasons:
You can learn from a good design, even if it’s old. (Just make your design look fresh.) And you would be wise to steer clear of the problems reported by our respondents, whether they encountered a problem recently, or some time ago. |
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Problems Solved by Portals |
Most intranets have become completely unwieldy and present a highly fragmented and confusing user experience, with no consistency and little navigational support. Portals aim to correct this problem by presenting a single gateway to all corporate information and services.
One benefit of creating this consistent look and feel is users need less time to learn how to use the environment. They also more easily recognize where they are in the portal and where they can go—no small feat when navigating a large information space. By integrating services and presenting personalized snippets on the initial screen, intranet portals also reduce the need for users to browse far and wide to obtain needed information, thus making it easier for them to perform their jobs. Ideally, that philosophy extends to include a unified security environment, including single sign-on, that frees users from constantly having to enter usernames and passwords. This approach pays dividends: today most help desk calls concern lost passwords. Furthermore multiple log-ins disrupt users. Yet while almost every interviewee stated they want a unified security environment, most have not yet achieved it. |
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From Turf Wars to Cross-Functional Governance |
One big change from our earlier research is that the first two editions of the report were dominated by stories about turf wars, with individual departments refusing to submit to the consistency of a portal for their intranet content. Now, we’re seeing fewer turf wars and more recognition of the benefits of the portal as a cross-company initiative.
Most companies have embraced cross-functional teams or steering committees as a way to ensure buy-in across departments. This softer approach to portal governance is much more successful than having a (perceived) arrogant central intranet group in the IT department ram a portal down the other departments’ collective throats. At the same time, successful portal projects can’t be run solely by a loosey-goosey assembly of well-intentioned people from across the organization. The portal has to be somebody’s job. In bigger organizations, it is a full-time job. But even in smaller places, there needs to be identified individuals who have the responsibility for the portal as part of their official job description. In particular, it’s important to realize that an intranet portal is not a one-time project that’s over and done when launched. The people in charge of the portal need to stay on the job after launch, or the intranet will suffer portal decay. Ongoing dedicated resources are required both to integrate new features and to maintain the quality of existing features like search. It’s amazing how quickly search quality degrades unless there's a continued push for good headlines and good intranet IA practices. |
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Single Sign-On Still Elusive |
Single sign-on is the Loch Ness Monster of the intranet world. People hear about it and even believe it exists, but they have not seen it for real.
It was already clear during our first round of portal research, five years ago, that single sign-on held the promise of dramatic improvements in user productivity and satisfaction, and that it would reduce support costs immensely. (A huge proportion of help desk calls relate to password problems.) At the time, single sign-on was more of a hope than a practical possibility. The second round of research confirmed this conclusion. True single-sign on was an extraordinarily rare exception, even in this third round of research. The only conclusion is that it’s truly difficult to do, despite the promises you hear. But we’re starting to see an interesting pragmatic approach to what Kaiser Permanente’s intranet team calls “reduced sign-on.” Work as hard as you can to reduce the number of times per day users are asked to authenticate themselves, even if you can’t get it down to one. Also, it’s possible to reduce user frustration by signaling the need for a separate log-in in the user interface before the user clicks the link that activates this demand. |
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News and Collaboration: Old and New Portal Drivers |
News continues to be one of the main applications of intranet portals. But just because it’s an established tool doesn’t mean that it should be ignored. Often, the biggest gains come from improving “boring” stuff that everybody knows — and that everybody uses.
News has two distinct roles on portals:
In any case, collaboration features on intranet portals tend to be business-oriented and benefit from the accountability that’s inherent in having all contributions attributed to an employee's real name. Flames are less severe when you sign your postings and address them to people you have face-to-face contact with in the cafeteria the next day. A strong lesson from our case studies is the need to make a business case for “Enterprise 2.0” features instead of being swayed by fashionable Web 2.0 trends. Many of these tools are more useful on intranets than on the open Internet, but portal managers should make sure they have the governance structure and rules in place and know how any new features will add real business value, before implementing them on the portal. If you can’t identify the business case, you’re better off focusing on further improvements to the old features already in place. |
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User-Informed Design |
Most portal teams base their design work on some form of user research. User testing, surveys, and card sorting are all frequently used, together with several other usability methods.
The problem is that surveys (which record what people say) are employed more than testing (which shows what people actually do). Those teams that have tried user testing for their portal project have become strong advocates for the method and report that they got high value from their tests. Sadly, the way to become convinced about the value of user testing is to actually conduct a test. Having us say that it’s important is nowhere as good a motivator as personal experience watching users. This is obviously a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, but we do see more and more intranet portals being subjected to user testing over time. |
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ROI Under-Documented |
Most portals teams don’t collect solid numbers to estimate the return on investment from their project. As an exception, Dell computed annual productivity gains of $36 million from its portal. Dell’s ROI number comes from its standard process improvement methodology, based on Six Sigma.
Smaller companies may certainly realize smaller savings, but they should still estimate ROI. This can be done to any desired level of rigor, but we don’t want to hold up Six Sigma as the standard everybody has to conform to, good as it is. It’s perfectly feasible to estimate a portal’s productivity improvements using simpler methods. Most teams justify their portals projects through softer means, such as improved user satisfaction and increased usage. With the increased emphasis on collaboration features in next-generation portals, measures of community activity form another argument that the features are being appreciated across the company. Many companies also view improved access to information as a key goal. It’s certainly possible to measure changes in employee awareness of corporate information, though portal teams currently tend to take a qualitative approach to assessing knowledge dissemination. Often, a portal is such an obvious improvement over the disorganized intranet that came before it that it seems a waste to bother with formal ROI metrics. The good news is that this is often true. We have seen some failed portals projects, and there are definitely many pitfalls that should be avoided, but a good intranet portal can add very clear value. |
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