After the successful conclusion of the redesign of the Sanger public-facing website (www.sanger.ac.uk) The Sanger have now invited me back to look at their intranet. The brief is to research and come up with a solution – then help deliver it.
Intranets are a whole world apart from normal websites – they are more inward looking and involve a lot more internal stakeholder work. The basics – like trying to figure out what the site is for and what it should do – are several degrees more complicated than an external site. Every dept within the organisation will have a difference view of what an intranet is for and their role in providing content. The competition for web space can be fierce!
In a way Intranets are like a family-only argument at a Sunday dinner. There’s the tension of needing to be civil versus the need to get your view heard. External sites are much more like having guests around – everyone is on good behaviour as the aim of the night – having a good night with friends say – is a lot more constrained.
And while pure graphic design is less of an issue for an inhouse site, the specification of page layouts is much more complicated as content can come from so many different directions.
Added to this are two more issues that all intranets must get right: personalisation and sociability. Personalisation is usually a red herring (only 5% of users personalise their home pages) and socialability can become very difficult indeed – some dept may embrace comments and internal blogs but others may hate the idea.
So all in all a nice challenge 