Redesigning sites to put customers at the centre of the universe

From our latest usability review, my agency's customers are saying that our website is looking a bit old, tired and dated.

They say it is very "about us" focused, covered in agency news items screaming 'look at me!', rather than "about them" - the customers!

Certainly many of our news messages are important (to customers), but news isn't what draws our customers to the website, it is information they become aware of when they go there to use our tools.

In the current design news is positions front and centre - where people look for important content. However the tools and resources important to our customers are pushed to the fringes - the far right or the bottom of the site.

So we're listening to our customers and I've received a go-ahead to make some changes.

The scope is the homepage and overall site template - we're not touching the primary navigation or content throughout the site.

I have set four rules for my team:

• Put customer needs first
• Use less words
• Minimise disruption
• Lift the look

Just to explain a few of the above.

Use less words:
Our home page is currently text rich - we want to cut down the words to the essential information to help customers move deeper into the site.

Minimise disruption:
We don't want to make regular visitors work harder to find tools. Even if we make tools easier to reach, this can make it harder for regulars who are habitualised to finding specific tools in particular places. This particularly goes for our main navigation, search and secure site login - none of which we want to make harder to find.

We are prepared to cause some disruption - you cannot adjust an interface without affecting some people - but we want to keep it as minimal as possible while achieving the other goals of the work.

Progress so far....
So far our web designer has put a lot of time into understand how people use our site, using all our data sources, and even asking a few real people.

From his preliminary rough design, we've had a very productive collaboration session to develop a wireframe (pic below) of how the homepage should be structured, using input from our customer research and website stats.

I've also conducted some preliminary ad hoc user testing to verify that this is regarded as a better design (it is from my small sample).

We're now fleshing out the wireframe to develop an appropriate interface pallette based on our corporate colours and fit the words we have to have before getting the design into a formal review process.

All opinions welcome!

New homepage initial wireframe























Key features

• Crest at top left
• Top menu realigned to left
• Search untouched
• Left/bottom menus untouched
• Secure login unmoved but more visible
• Important tools centred, in logical groups
• Frequently used tools buttons at right
• News items below tools with less text
• Subscribe options besides news

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Has eGovernment stalled at the half-way point?

Reading up on one of my favourite eGov blogs, In the Eye of the Storm, I found this post from February with some great slides and commentary on how far e-government has gone, but how little has changed in the last few years, e-government 3.0.

Edited 16/06: This article is further reinforced by this article in ITWeek, UK e-government fails to make the grade


Is this the same experience as we have in Australia?

It's now common to get information from government online, it's also common to transact with government online. However, can we interact with government online yet?

As in the UK, in Australia government appears to have been very slow about taking the next step - to actually converse with our customers online.

I'm happy to say that my agency is taking baby steps into interacting on forums, and we've talked about providing web-based text or voice chat to interact with customers, but are still some big steps away from this.

If the name of the game is customer service, and customers want to interact with government online (as AGIMO's latest eGovernment Satisfaction report is telling us) - why are we holding back?

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An intranet isn't an information management system, but it has a role to play

A dilemma we're dealing with in my agency is that many projects have placed their documentation within the intranet and, over time, this has become the authoritative source of the most current copy of some documents.

This means that the owners of the content are very sensitive towards any changes to the intranet's structure which might reduce access to their pages - despite having only small audiences - because if there's an ANAO audit the intranet is the repository of the master documents.

I discourage the use of the intranet in this manner as it does not (in its current version) meet the records management requirements of the National Archives. We don't have appropriate version control, documents cannot be locked, ownership is flexible and archiving, while appropriate for an intranet, isn't up to information management standards.

However our Knowledge Management strategy does features the intranet as a major plank as it is an important tool for storing information, and a primary tool for people to communicate information.

I have seen attempts in the past to co-opt an organisation's intranet and turn it into an information management system. In these cases the intranet was developed according to the standards for digital record keeping.

This worked very well - as an information management tool. However it was lousy at communicating information to staff and lost significant credibility (and usage) - essentially nullifying one of the most important communication tools in the organisation.

The last I heard the organisation has hived off the information management parts and is seeking to regrow a conventional intranet.

I can understand why an organisation might attempt to turn an intranet into an information management system.

Good intranets are used frequently by the majority of staff, they store records (pages and files) and they are in many cases relatively easy to author and edit.

Whereas many information management systems are developed like old-style terminal systems, use strange processes to collect metadata, require enormous amounts of time to add records and are not very good at making information easy to find - unless you know precisely what you are looking for.

I've used several in the past and their usability, accessibility, design, search tool and general processes did not impress me alongside the intranet content management systems available at the time.

I can only think of one good reason why this difference exists - because information management systems have to meet lots of information storage standards - an intranet system can ignore them and make things easier for authors and users.


So should your intranet be an information management system?

My view is that it shouldn't - it should focus on what intranets do best, communicate information relevant to staff, facilitate collaboration and support staff in performing job-related tasks through being a central gateway / repository of tools and services.

If possible your intranet should also have a social aspect to help build (an appropriate) organisational culture and build staff loyalty and commitment by helping them feel like family - all work and no play makes Jack/Jill look elsewhere for an enjoyable work experience.

However intranets do have their part to play within an information management strategy.

An intranet is one of the mediums in which information is stored, and is a great tool for spreading information to those who need it within an organisation.

It is also a gateway to tools - such as an information management system - and tight integration between the two helps ensure that teams more effectively collaborate and manage their information.

I recommend that organisations consider their intranet as a 'primer' to help their staff get into the practice of information management.

First get enough of your staff using your intranet to create, store and share information through making the intranet easy to access, easier to author and full of appropriate content and tools.

Then once your staff have gotten the hang of putting content and files into an online system, introduce them to the 'real' information management system, which (in an ideal situation) integrates with the intranet and is almost as easy to use.

This way you'll not only ensure that your intranet is doing its job, but that your information management system is as well.

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Presentation Zen in Sydney 4 July!

James Robertson from Step Two Designs has organised for Garr Reynolds, presentation guru and writer of the Presentation Zen blog (and now book) to give one public event in Sydney while he's in Australia.

It's not free, but it's well worth investigating: http://www.steptwo.com.au/columntwo/index.html

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Intranet pruning

My team, in association with our web of content editors, recently completed a major review of the content within our intranet.

This has dramatically improved the currency of information throughout the site, with over 90% of the content having been reviewed and updated within the last year, up from slightly over 60% before I took over the intranet.

The oldest content in the site now is less than two years old, and generally these are navigational pages where the links remain current and there's no content to update.

A complaint I've heard regularly in other organisations I've worked for is that the intranet was no use as the content was old and was never updated.

This, along with search issues, appear to the two of the largest complaints about most intranets (and as was pointed out at a recent conference I attended, if you improve them but don't promote the changes staff will not change their perceptions).


The content review, considering our intranet is now around 3,000 pages in size - took around six months in total as a background task for two people alongside other work.

We were helped enormously by the content owners across the agency, who understand the importance of our intranet to the agency's day-to-day functioning. My team has also put considerable effort into building this understanding, which helps underpin the intranet's value.

There were some pages which had lost their owners due to normal organisational attrition, and when we could not identify other owners with the help of business areas we took a 'slash and burn' approach - we gave the agency's business areas a month's notice and then removing unowned pages from the live intranet to see if anyone complained.

This worked fantastically well - where pages were important there were rapid complaints and a content owner stepped forward. Given that it only takes a few seconds to restore a page, there were no long-term impacts and we now know who owns all the content in the intranet for ongoing review.

This approach may not work for all organisations, however given the large changes we're implementing at the moment, it made sense to create a little pain to avoid much greater pain in the future.

Our ongoing reviews will now be substantially smaller and the approach has also been useful in further building the credibility of our intranet as we've promoted the updating widely within the organisation.

I'd be very interested in the experiences of other managers in maintaining information currency in their online properties.

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