It’s time for the final part of our 3-part interview series 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 from here, and what the future might hold.
By now you know what you”re here for, so let’s get on with it:
Intranet Ideas: So, as you mentioned we’re seeing some interesting shifts in the way people use computers, the internet and by extension intranets too – how, in your opinion, will this shape the future of intranet design?
The Designer: For me, I think it’s important that people realise that the future of wider web usage and technology is inextricably tied to, and perhaps necessarily even the template for, the future of intranet design. As we’ve seen with the advent of social media in the intranet environment and the increase in online mobile access, what happens to the internet happens to the intranet – so that’s what i’m going to focus on as the answer here.
First of all, devices will become more diverse, if that’s not too much of a tongue twister! PCs aren’t going to disappear overnight, nor even for a long while yet if indeed they ever do, but alternatives such as tablets will become more mainstream within business – for example, we already see floor staff using them in the retail sector retail as a logical progression from previous point-of-sale devices.
This diversification will take the focus away from PCs as the hub of business computing, but make no mistake – they will still be a necessary and vital part of office computing environments for the foreseeable future. More and more, though, mobile access will become a big part of the way we access our software, because nowadays people don’t necessarily need to be sat at a desk to do their work, and just as importantly management attitudes are changing sufficiently to recognise this fact.
This change will have a knock-on effect on Line of Business (LoB) applications in terms of their strategic development, because developers will either have to produce functionality that works just as well on each type of device, the alternative being to create different versions of the same software to access the same information. You know, when you thik about it there’s genuine potential for the different demands placed on software development by traditional PCs versus those placed on it by tablet and mobile device interfaces to become this decade’s version of the IE6 vs web standards battle.
Apart from that, which I suppose we’ve dealt with to some extent earlier [in previous posts], HTML5 and CSS3 look like they will be big influences on the future of online design and the systems we use to access software. CSS3, on its part, can reduce the amount of imagery used in delivering web content, bringing down the load on browsers – reinforcing the thin client model that you hear people talk about.
An example of this, which is so simple and elementary but which actually makes a genuine difference to web – and intranet – designers, is when you want to create rounded corners in a design. Previously, these would have to be images, meaning more load on the browser and just a more fiddly design, whereas now CSS3 allows you to use its border radius functionality to create the exact rounded corners that you need via the code itself, without the hassle of images.
Then you also have HTML5. HTML5 has a whole world of possible uses – check out http://slides.html5rocks.com/ – that really open up the exciting potential of the web. One example of this is the use of video tags, which reduces the need for Flash video because the fucntionality is taken care of by the browser itself, rather than Flash, that is essentially a plug-in. There’s a good argument to say that this will make the browsing experience more stable, and there would be fewer issues with Flash, for example when it slows people’s browsers down.
Online video is a huge part of the web’s future, and intranet people can see this too as video content increasingly becomes part of, and in some areas replaces, traditional documentation for things such as training or internal comms advert strategies. A huge factor that will dictate the way that online videos develop is the video codec standard, which has become a battleground for the big tech/browser companies.Again, it’s totally tied to the browsers!
Mozilla and Opera are stronngly advocating Ogg Vorbis as the preferred candidate for the delivery of online video, but Apple are plowing a different furrow on this and want to use the h264 codec. The winner of this battle would, to a significant extent, dictate the future development of online video.
To get another cook involved in making this video codec broth, to horribly mangle that old idiom, Google has come in and backed what is actually a high-quality codec in WebM, which is similar to h264 but which is also Open Source like Ogg Vorbis, so you would think that this would be a perfect fit for both sides in this debate, but as far as i know it’s far from anywhere near being resolved to any satisfactory degree. The way that this debate eventually works out will really strongly shape the future of video content on the web, and by extension the future of video content on intranets. Obviously, the side that wins this war gets to a large extent to dictate how video works on the web, and eventually this will seep through to business computing, to LoB apps and to intranets.
Anyway, that’s just a taster of what’s to come, a glimpse into one of many potential futures, but I think I’ve dealt with the most obvious issues at this point in time. I suppose that, from this interview, the message I would want people to take away from this is that they need to take notice of trends in the wider tech world, because many of these will become established internet computing functionality, which will then become business computing functionality, which will then also become intranet functionality.
However, and even more so in the business world than elsewhere, you have to be careful about being an ‘early adopter’. If you get in there too ealry and throw your lot in with one specific technology or product, then you can end up being tied to it for an eternity or, even worse, investing in something that is quietly shoved aside in the race for the next big thing.
Ultimately, the aim is to strike a balance between getting your hands on the best functionality available, and getting your hands on something that is durable, long-term and built to last: you could sum it up as a matter of creativity vs continuity. That means that there needs to be agreement on certain practices and principles before a technology becomes truly viable from a business perspective – and ideally, that should also include a clearly-defined way forward and, if necessary, an exit strategy so that things don’t get bogged down in total dependence on one technology.
It’s a bit wooly, a bit idealist, and a bit ‘warm and fuzzy’, but my hope is that we can go on from here, having learnt the lessons of the past. We should be working towards a future where everyone has a say and there’s room for competing technologies to ultimately work together, each in their own way, towards a situation where it’s all about making the online experience better for everyone. Hopefully, that would mean that we’d never have a situation where one element is holding back the wider world of intranet design.
We hope that you enjoyed the Interview with an Intranet Designer series, and we would be delighted to hear your comments; please do leave them below if you’d like to say anything about this article, or why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.
