It has been a little while since the last post on Intranet Ideas, so we thought we’d go for some interesting and original content to mark our return.
To this end, we’re going to talk about intranet design: this area seems to be at quite an interesting crossroads at the moment, as shifts in non-business computing and usage models are increasingly having a direct effect on what we find online, so we thought we’d sit down with someone who has a direct role in both web and intranet design, and years of experience to back it up, to find out their thoughts on where intranet design is now, where it has come from and where it’s going. There’s a lot of content in terms of the word count we came out with, so we have split it up into three parts: past, present and future, each of which we’ll publish as a separate piece.
All contributors of course remain anonymous…
Part 1: The Past
Intranet Ideas: Thanks for giving us a few minutes of your time to pick your brains on the subject of intranet design. It seems like quite an exciting time at the moment for someone in your field of expertise; the way we use the wider web, and the devices on which we do so, seem to be having an increasingly significant impact on the way we operate online in the world of intranets and other business applications. Ultimately, we want to talk more about where we’re going with intranet design, but I suppose that if we’re going to get the bigger picture then we need to talk about we’re we’ve come from too – what, in your opinion, has been the biggest past influence on intranet design?
The Designer: Well, it’s not a popular answer, but taking into account the majority of past business usage it’s probably a true one: IE6. Around the turn of the millennium, following the ‘dot-com boom’ of the late ’90s, you saw a lot of action in terms of companies investing in IT systems to a huge extent; the potential of the web for corporate comms was at the time both proven to some extent and also still a genuinely exciting future prospect. Also not too long after the turn of the millennium IE6 was released, and its subsequent dominance in terms of browser market share was huge – we’re talking 80%-90% by some estimates, and for the next good few years.
Don’t forget that IE6 was not just hugely dominant in the business sphere, but it ruled internet access in general too. So, at this point, pretty much any company investing in online IT systems was effectively tied in to IE6, because there wasn’t too much else out there that would get buy-in from a business perspective. Browser share was largely insignificant from a business perspective for non-IE browsers, between Netscape’s decline and the arrival of other competitors onto the scene. It was – almost literally – no competition, and so IE6 more or less dictated what you could do online.
Now, back then it wasn’t so much of a restriction – the browser was new, there was a lot of exciting stuff that you could achieve. However, as we all know, the resulting amount of development and investment in compliant Line of Business (LoB) applications has created a situation that even today has not been totally resolved – a lot of money has been invested in systems that were built specifically to work with IE6, and which therefore don’t play well with other browsers at all. This means that, to this day, there are lots of companies which have systems in place that are critical to the correct running of their operations that are also, to a large extent, IE6-only – they are still limited by the constraints placed upon them by a browser iteration that is now almost a decade old. Ten years is a long time to anyone, but, in web development terms, technology that was released ten years ago is almost prehistoric.
The knock-on effects still exist: in the HTML and CSS for the systems in question, you’d have to do things specifically to work with IE6. The problem is that the way it worked wasn’t what we now know as ‘standards-compliant‘, so when other, more standards-compliant browsers came out later on, they really showed up the gap between the browser market; as the development community went on increasingly to favour standards compliance in their browsers, a real gap started to open up.
And a lot of time has been spent since then in trying to bridge or make up that gap – on the part of coders, on the part of designers and on the part of Microsoft – but because IE6 went five years without a successor in IE7, its limitations became truly bedded-in within many businesses, all of whose systems were more or less built specifically to suit IE6. LoB apps are probably the main reason IE6 is still as prevalent as it is today; it takes a lot of time and money to upgrade your systems if you’re a large company, and if you’re a smaller one you might not have the money to do so at all.
Intranets, my main design focus, are of course to a large extent part of the LoB infrastructure, so the hangover has affected their development as much as that of any other system; we’re at a point now where we’re able to focus future development squarely on future technologies, with Microsoft’s predicted cut-off point for IE6 support announced for 2014, but even so we still have to bear in mind that we can’t count it out completely until everyone makes the jump to a more recent browser.
Check back for Part 2: The Present, the second in our three-part interview series; in the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.
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[...] on the past, present and future of intranet design. You can find parts 1 and 2 of our interview here and here; this part deals with our anonymous designer’s views on where intranet design goes [...]