A few years back I started using this process to build Intranets and built the foundational structure of over 40 sites with fantastic results.
Most companies that build Intranets the same way. They send a business analyst around the company to interview people and compile a list of needs blah blah blah…
The result is a functional site, but it’s missing something crucial.
Culture.
Every company develops its own unique culture and forms of communication and the only way to really get user adoption up in a corporate intranet is to understand that culture and bring it into the site. And if you do a good job of understanding that culture, you can build the brand momentum you need with your employees.
In other words, it’s a marketing problem. If you can’t effectively sell your brand internally, you’ll never sell it well enough externally.
The 24 HOUR PROCESS.
I break this down to three, eight hour days. From the client side, we like to have between 15 and 20 people representing the business from upper management to business unit management to sales, marketing, HR, IT etc. Anyone who’s going to need a stake in the final site should be there.
Then from my side, I come in with senior Design, UX and technology architecture. If it’s going to be a SharePoint site, we bring in a SharePoint architect.
The first day we discuss user personas. Who needs to use the site and what are their needs. We’ll also break down the site navigation, what needs to be there and how do we organize it.
Then we stay up late building out the initial wireframe structure and navigation and bring it in the next morning for us to work through and refine. Then that second night we flesh out more of the site, work up major secondary pages, finalize the sitemap and personas and homepage wireframes and build out the creative for a unique user adoption campaign, as well as naming the new site.
By the end of the third day, we’re done. You’ve got a clear understanding of the unique structure of your new Intranet, the navigation, a great name your organization will appreciate and the basics for a user adoption campaign that will help launch the new site. Then over the next two weeks we finalize everything into tight comps, ready to be built internally or through one of our development partners. Or if you want to get bids on the site, our final deliverables will give you an exact apples to apples comparison with accurate buildout estimates.
You spend 24 hours with us and we’ll cut months out of the process.
It’s worked over 40 times for companies as big as MolsonCoors and as unique as Ball Corporation.