Intranet In A Box - Customer Carewords · intranet function that is very important to employees. Included in this group is a growing number of news tasks that are ”bottom up”

Customer Carewords – Top Task Management for Websites

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Intranet In A Box

Building intranets using data from 55

organizations and 49,000 employees

Brian Lamb, Fredrik Wackå Audun Rundberg, Gerry McGovern Customer Carewords March 2015


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Table of Contents

Common tasks for employees ....................................................... 3

Top Task data from 49,000 employees ........................................... 3

About Me .................................................................................... 5

About (your company) ................................................................. 5

Find People & Collaboration .......................................................... 5

News / Current affairs .................................................................. 6

Core Tasks ................................................................................. 6

What are Core Tasks? ............................................................... 7

Intranet in a box - Using the five components to design intranets...... 7

Navigation with the Top Tasks .................................................... 7

Where is ‘News’? ...................................................................... 8

Using individual Top Tasks in Navigation...................................... 8

Further levels of navigation ........................................................ 9

Top Tasks doable on the page ................................................... 11

A top tasks use illustration .......................................................... 12

Conclusion ................................................................................. 13

About Customer Carewords ......................................................... 14


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Common tasks for employees Brace yourself for this message: You are not unique. Your intranet

could, even should, share its basic framework with other organizations.

Yes there are different organizational cultures, different traditions and

customs. And certainly, a local government intranet serves different needs than the intranet of a global tech company.

However, there is a basic set of common Top Tasks, identified in this

paper, that provide a framework for an employee-centric, productive intranet.

Top Task data from 49,000 employees Top Task Management is a set of principles and methods for building customer/employee-centric sites, both intranets and websites. The

starting point is a Top Task poll where customers vote for their top needs – the things that are most important to them.

For this paper, we analyzed Top Task poll results from 55 intranet

polls. Altogether, 49,000 employees in the US, Canada, UK, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway participated in the polls.

There was a mix of government and business intranets, from medium to large organizations (10,000+ employees).

For our analysis, we combined the top voted tasks from each poll and then looked at them together.


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Striking patterns emerged. Firstly, four common groups of Top Tasks were present in every set of poll results.


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About Me ‘About Me’ is the group of tasks related to the personal experience of

being in employment. If you have a job then you do ‘About Me’ tasks – apply for holidays, claim travel expenses, find out what benefits you

are entitled to, etc. The names of these tasks might vary but ‘About Me’ tasks are ubiquitous in both the public and private sector. They are

often the most visited and used parts of an intranet.

In some polls we saw two clear sub-types of ‘About Me’ tasks. Firstly, there are ‘Service & Support’ type tasks, which make use of an

internal service. For instance, “order work clothing” or “what is available for lunch at the canteen”. Secondly, there are ‘My

Employment’ tasks such as “what was I paid last month”.

About (your company) These tasks relate specifically to the organization you work for:

What are your organizations’ published strategies and plans? Details about its size and location and how it's organized

(although organization charts are also important in Find People & Collaboration)

Find People & Collaboration Finding people is a classic intranet function and unsurprisingly it appears as a group of tasks in all our polls. This is the Company

Directory, the Phone Book, or just Search for people. The underlying concern here is the need to find a person with a special function whose

name you don’t know. For example, I need to find someone who speaks German and is experienced in sales. Our polls show the

importance of this task is increasing.

Once you find an expert or colleague often what you want to do is

collaborate with them using the growing number of tools available to you on your intranet. This could mean inviting them to join a

discussion, following their blog or yammer posts, asking them a specific question via IM, or simply calling them up.


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News / Current affairs These tasks are concerned with keeping updated about what the

organization is doing externally and internally. Again, this is a classic intranet function that is very important to employees. Included in this

group is a growing number of news tasks that are ”bottom up” like popular recent posts on yammer or blogs, as well as more traditional

top down news from the CEO or the central communications team. Also in this group is news from external sources about the company or

organization.

These task groups are like the heat, light and power in a building. They are the needs employees expect an intranet to fulfill. The names

of the groups might vary with language and culture but there is a basic expectation from employees that they should be able to complete

these sorts of tasks on an intranet.

Core Tasks Alongside the four common Top Task groups, we found another group

of Top Tasks in each poll result. These were tasks that did not fit into the common groups but were particular to an organization. They relate

to the core purpose of an organization, its essence, the thing people are employed to produce or deliver. We call this group Core Tasks.


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What are Core Tasks?

Often these tasks are centered on the Products and Services an

organization offers to its customers. In a Bank, we found Internet Banking to be a top task

In a Healthcare organization, Patient Safety and Clinical Standards were Top tasks

In a railway company, it was Ticket Types In a pharmaceutical company, Clinical Trials

In a technology company, it was Products and Services (R&D, sales and marketing, support.)

In a company that made engines—surprise, surprise—there was a lot about Engines.

In the Internal Revenue Services, it was Reports and Audits. In a retailer, it was their Stores (merchandising, stock

management, promotion, performance). In an airport, it was Security

Sometimes the core tasks are associated with the culture or strategy of an organization. For example, in a fast moving high street retailer

the top task was – Performance Reports.

Core tasks are where the intranet can be seen to be really adding value and contributing to performance goals like increased sales and

reduced costs.

Intranet in a box - Using the five components to design intranets Often politics, emotion and opinion play far too big a part in designing

intranets. By using the Top Task groups, designs start with data (not opinion) on what employees need from their intranet. We can short-

circuit pointless turf wars and debates and move rapidly to basic

designs focused on Top Tasks. How does this work in practice?

Navigation with the Top Tasks

Our data shows that the five groups described above are always

priorities for employees. Sometimes they are called different things but they’re always there. So why not use them for navigation design?

The basic wireframe below shows what this looks like.


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This may not be the final top level navigation but it is an excellent starting point and allows you to move quickly to testing and refining

your design.

Where is ‘News’?

News is different from the other Top Tasks. The task is not to read news in general, it’s to find news relevant to you. News needs to be

seen as several different tasks depending on the needs and concerns of employees. On the home page, the easiest way to complete this

task is to have a list of news items so people can scan and decide what to read. Navigating to News is often not as important so the "news

archive" link doesn't need to be in the main menu.

Using individual Top Tasks in Navigation

When an individual task is voted number one by a wide margin we refine the basic model. In the poll below, Training was the number one

voted task by a significant amount.


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Singularly high priority tasks like these become part of the global navigation, as in the example below.

Further levels of navigation

The clusters of individual tasks within the 5 Top Task groups show

which tasks belong together. This clustering is the basis for creating task subclasses.

The Top Tasks poll gives these items a weight, allowing us to prioritize

tasks within the groups. Higher scoring items become the basis for the level 2 navigation.


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We can use the clusters to derive subclasses of the main groups like

About Me.


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Again, we stress that these are starting points, not a finished classification scheme. However, they allow us to make rapid progress

in designing the navigation aspect of the intranet.

Top Tasks doable on the page

Employees will judge the effectiveness of your design by how easily they can get things done. This means making it possible to start Top

Tasks (not just navigate to them) on individual pages. In our ‘About Me’ example shown above, following any of the links in the dropdown

menu leads to a page where it’s possible to immediately start doing a task.


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A top tasks use illustration The mock up below illustrates these and some other uses of the Top Tasks in design.


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Conclusion

So do we have an Intranet in a Box, ready to go? Not quite, but it’s certainly a good start. Without doubt, the best intranets are built by

those who view them in a logical way, based on data of what employees actually need to do.

Using the Top Task groups as a jumping off point, it’s possible to

design navigation and classification, drive development of applications based on top tasks, configure search, and improve the way content is

written – using data, not opinion.

March, 2015

www.customercarewords.com

http://www.customercarewords.com/


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About Customer Carewords Customer Carewords has been focused on the online customer

experience since 1994. We help large organizations make complex websites more customer-centric. Our method is called Top Tasks

Management.

Top Tasks Management helps you truly understand what the top tasks of your customers are when they come to your website and how well

these tasks are performing. By continuously improving the performance of your customers’ top tasks, you will maximize the

performance of your website.

We have been developing customer-centric strategies for websites since 1994, identifying the top tasks of thousands of customers and

employees for organizations such as Microsoft, Cisco, Tetra Pak, IBM, VMware, BBC, Innovation Norway, etc. We have partners in the UK,

Holland, Sweden, Belgium, Norway, Canada and United States.

Top tasks management is built around the following ideas:

Customers come to your public website or intranet to complete tasks. (Staff are the intranet's customers.)

Customers have a small set of top tasks (the Long Neck). These tasks are vital to the success of your website and you must seek

to continuously improve your customers’ ability to complete them quickly and easily.

Customers use a small set of words to describe their top tasks (carewords).

The words your customers use to describe their tasks are often very different from the words your organization uses.

Top tasks management is a set of research tools and techniques that

help you identify on an ongoing basis:

Your customers' top tasks (and their related words). How well your customers are able to complete their top tasks on

your website (completion rates, completion times, disaster rates).

What specific factors on your website are causing problems as your customers seek to complete their tasks (the navigation, the

content, the search, etc.).

www.customercarewords.com [email protected]

http://www.customercarewords.com/

mailto:[email protected]

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Intranet In A Box - Customer Carewords · intranet function that is very important to employees. Included in this group is a growing number of news tasks that are ”bottom up”