Interview with an Intranet Designer Part 2

Part 1 of our intranet design interview series dealt with intranet design’s past, and the influencing factors that have led us to where we are today. As you would expect, this second installment deals with the current intranet design landscape, and what users want to see on the intranets of today, with part 3 due soon to deal with the future.

Without any further ado, here’s the lowdown on the present:

Intranet Ideas: So, now that you’re seeing the light at the end of the IE6 tunnel, what does the current intranet design landscape look like? What are you seeing in terms of demand for today’s functionality?

The Designer: Well, we’re not out of that tunnel just yet, but now even Microsoft, to its credit, is actively trying to stop companies using that particular browser iteration – they have the IE6 Countdown site, and in 2014 support officially stops for good. If you have a quick look at that site, you can see that the current usage statistics are interesting – there’s still a lot of usage in China, an emerging market in our field and a growing power that could potentially influence things, but in all other territories usage is now much less prevalent: though it still tops 10% in middle east and asia, it now accounts for under 5% of all browser usage in Europe Africa and Americas. I’d bet good money that 99% of all those users still on IE6 are business users, too.

Now, in 2011, we have a multitude of available browsers: in addition to the latest IE offerings there’s Safari, Chrome, Firefox etc., and development is now usually focused on cross-browser functionality. It’s not as PC and IE-focused as before. Device market share has always been a big driver in creating this situation, with Apple’s mobile devices as well as an increase in Mac usage in corporate environments that generally have Safari and/or iOS tied in, and of course other mobile devices are also far less dependent on IE too. Lots of businesses, not just personal users, have diverse user bases now in this respect, and they need this to be catered for in their intranet installations. That wasn’t really the case even 5 or 6 years ago, apart from maybe in dedicated arts/design firms – there has been a definite shift in attitudes within the business environment.

For me, the cause of this shift is all about people changing from traditional usage models, and a big part of this at the moment is the trend for accessing corporate apps on mobile and tablet devices such as the iPad. That influences what people feel comfortable using online, and what they expect to see in other online environments. People of all ages these days are now far more comfortable within online spaces in general via a wide range of devices, and they expect the functionality and ease of use that they experience in their personal web usage to be replicated to a great extent in business environments: they judge against those benchmarks, so the devices with the most market share will influence the way that online business environments develop, in much the same way that IE did when people took their first PC-based steps online. That has significant implications for the world of intranets, and doubly so now that we have seen the advent of Social Media for business.

I suppose you’ve also got to look at performance and security as influences here – the more market share a browser has, the more likely people are to write code to target it. Security is without doubt one of the most important concerns for LoB apps, so the more secure a browser is the more you can state its case for use withing business environments. And make no mistake, browser security is taken very, very seriously: recently, IE, Firefox & Chrome all underwent a hacker test at pwn2own [a hacking competition that is held every year at the CanSecWest security conference] to find out which was the most resilient of the currently available browser choices on the market. To cut a long story short, the hackers did their worst (or best) to get through the security measures for each browser; the winner this time actually turned out to be Google’s Chrome, so it will be interesting to see what future years bring on that front.

Of course, all of the above just goes to prove that everyone would ideally be using the latest and best browsers available. Everybody realises that – perhaps especially those users tied to older systems – but you also have to be realistic and accept that as intranet designers the reality is that we’re still at a point where there is a definite mix out there.

At one end of the spectrum, we have companies who need to stick to older browsers because they can’t adapt their systems, and you can see the difficulty implementing change on a professional level too – not many people would have the guts to go to the CTO and let him know that in next month’s budget meeting he has to tell the board that a large part of their IT infrastructure is swifty becoming outdated. And at the other end, you then have businesses that are not tied in to legacy apps or software at all, that are free to choose whatever functionality they want and that are actively looking for the latest advances in web technology to be instantly available on their own intranets – it can be a bit of a balancing act to keep everyone happy.

Increasingly, though, those who do stick with older browsers will see more and more of a difference between the functionality that their systems can offer and the functionality that is offered online in more or less every other capacity. You run the risk of going back to the old days, where business computing functionality was pretty much alien to the average office worker, and this would bring back the chore of training users to use clunky, largely unfamiliar and unengaging systems. That actually erodes the benefits that the systems in question initially brought to the business – the financial investment that you’re ostensibly protecting by not moving to a modern browser actually becomes less and less valuable as the system falls behind without the new functionality that a new browser would bring. At some point, I suppose you have to just draw a line in the sand – the tough decision will have to be taken to migrate to newer technologies or you’ll get left too far behind. People know this, too, so the only question is exactly when the leap will happen; much as I’d like to say otherwise, it may not be uncommon to see companies using IE6 beyond the 2014 support cutoff point.

As I say, in the middle of all of the clamour for new functionality you still have to be realistic: the barriers to the upgrade process are precisely those that constrain the vast majority of businesses across their operational scope – namely, time and money. In some cases, the more time and money that people have put into their old systems the more of those resources it will take to move them out, but I think that in many other cases it could just be a simple case of a swift audit, then migrating or archiving the useful content and just starting more or less afresh. And just imagine how much more enjoyable it would be suddenly to have today’s web technology at your fingertips for your daily job, rather than continuing with that of a decade or so ago. But whatever your circumstances, there’s a certain amount of change management to be undertaken if you want to reach that goal.

As for how this affects intranet design, these days we’re making more creative designs that incorporate more of the latest functionality – we had the race for ‘Web 2.0′ apps, and since then the focus has been trained on the incorporation and management of social media within the business workplace, so we’re just trying to figure out how to make things work across both old and new environments. And a lot of this work to incorporate more media-rich functionality within older systems is largely image-based by nature, due to the technological constraints in place, which unfortunately increases the load on the browser – it’s a vicious circle in some ways. CSS does help with these issues, but even then some of the things that we try aren’t supported by older browsers, so unfortunately the functionality available in those browsers can suffer because of that.

However, it’s not all a question of browsers – you can’t discount the role that your organisation’s corporate policies and procedures have in dictating what’s available on your intranet. For example, video content has become massively popular on intranets in general recently, and this has been provided mostly via Flash up to now; YouTube has of course been the big driver here, embedding videos has become second nature to web users, and its ubiquity and ease of use has been replicated in many LoB environments to great success – users nowadays expect it in their business environments too. But this is where company security policies can dictate available functionality: up to now, it has largely been the case that if users aren’t allowed to install Flash then video on the intranet is not an option. So, if you’re operating in an environment with strict rules on what’s allowed within the firewall then you have to manage expectations to match this fact.

As I mentioned, social media has become wildly popular too, and if people can see it elsewhere online then they wonder whether they can have it on their intranet, with the aim of incorporating familiar functionality to create an environment that is truly engaging and that people are genuinely comfortable using. Adoption is easy if you’ve used something before. But while some companies are receptive to the idea of this sort of functionality, others really do not see the benefit. It’s a question of culture – some companies want their brand to be corporate, others want to be casual.

Brand guidelines and the marketing department can also play a hugely influential role here: your company’s personality – ‘who you are’ – dictates what you do, and that applies online as much as anywhere else. Currently, I would say that there is certainly more of a general trend towards ‘casual’ intranets, and I would say that this is maybe a result of social media’s omnipresence in the online world – companies increasingly want to replicate that engaging, personal feel. Perhaps there’s also a shift in the wider business world – organisations, certainly from a promotional perspective if nothing else, are becoming less about starched collars and more about connecting with your clients on a one-to-one level.

The traditional divides are being blurred online – market leaders in the wider world of personal and social web technology, who traditionally inhabit environments entirely separate from the inner workings of the average business, are increasingly dictating the shape of internal online business operations. Personal computing is becoming business computing, and vice versa – the distinction is less clear.

If we can hark back to the past again, you might even say that the paperless, online, 24-7 available ‘anywhere office’ that was widely predicted 10, 15, 20 years ago is finally close to becoming a reality in terms that are genuinely meaningful to the average employee, rather than just techie types. Back in the early 1990s only a tiny percentage of the general population owned any sort of mobile device, and even regular PC use in business environments was far less widespread and prolific then than it is now – and that’s without mentioning the widespread lack of web access. Now, in 2011, people can conduct their business in a variety of ways that would have been more or less unimaginable twenty or thirty years ago – using smart devices to log on to web-based systems and communicate from anywhere at any time with anyone across the globe – even now we’re only just starting to see the potential of the internet to revolutionise the way we work.

Check back for Part 3 – The Future, the final part in our three-part interview series. Please leave your comments below – we’d love to hear from you. In the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.