The (massive) Diamond Award is for someone’s remarkable contribution to the intranet community.

What does ‘contribution’ mean? What does ‘community’ mean? Honestly, you know.

The Diamond Award recognises individuals who share their work, knowledge, experience. People who are involved, engaged, and helpful.

It can be about publishing books and speaking at conferences, but it’s often about blogging, about deep and frequent conversations on LinkedIn, or the quality of sharing on Twitter.

It may be about helping connect and bring people together in person to share their experiences.

It’s definitely about influencing how people perceive and use intranets, but it’s also about doing good work – knowing your onions and having the work to prove it.

So while there are many consultants that spring to mind, we should be open to recognising in-house practitioners who share their internal work externally; who leave their desks and engage; those who publish their ‘week notes’ or tweet out their employee research conclusions or blog their digital workplace projects.

Obviously there is a whole load of expertise across our industry, but we want to recognise those ‘digital types’ who share their expertise.

Our past winners include Sam Marshall, Martin White, James Roberson, The Intranetizens (Dana Leeson, Jonathan Phillips, Sharon O’Dea, Luke Mepham), Ellen van Aken, and Rupert Bowater.

They won because of their commitment to sharing their experiences with others. Their presence online helps shape our community, and supports the work people are doing in-house.

So, who has influenced your approach to digital? Nominate now.

The award is mine and Lisa’s to give, after advice from our past winners – the Diamond alumni.

Winner announced on stage at the Intranet Now conference in London, 4th October 2019.

[This is the script of Scott McArthur’s ‘mini keynote’ at Intranet Now (Oct 2017).]

The presentation is embedded at the end.

Good afternoon and thanks very much to Wedge and Brian for giving me the ‘after lunch’ slot; the ever-popular graveyard shift….  Regardless, I hope that the next 15 minutes or so proves to be time well spent for you all.

Today I’m going to talk about some guiding principles for communicating with other people,  which apply not only to intranets and other mediums but that, I think uniquely for today’s event, will also improve your love life.

A few years ago (when I was working for one of the big consulting firms),  I came across something that made me smile,  whilst at the same time making me think about the area in which I was working – human resources and change.

The CIA had just declassified their 1944 Simple Sabotage Field Manual.  This Kafkaesque guide claimed to provide the means to subvert any organisation through the use of “purposeful stupidity” or, as I like to call it, “weaponised HR”.  I’m sure the irony will not be lost on you all, what with the shenanigans going on with the Trump presidency, but here was quite possibly the first (and hopefully not last!) example of HR adding value at the highest level.

As a trained scientist (my best line is that I went from human remains to human resources), I took this field guide with a pinch of salt, as I couldn’t find any evidence beyond anecdotes that any of the disruptive practices it suggested would affect organisations.  Remembering that, anecdotes (even lots of them) do not equal data.

Then along came the work of Said Business School’s Danish economic geographer, Bent Flyvbjerg, and his team, who are engaged in understanding why projects fail.  It turns out that there are three major reasons for failure. The first category (which other speakers have already mentioned today), was referred to by Flyvberg  as technical and estimation problems. Not too much of a surprise there. The second and third reason, however, really interested me as a student of the CIA’s “purposeful stupidity” (mentioned above).  One of these reasons was “psychological bias”, which refers to mental shortcuts (A.K.A. heuristics) in our thinking, which are not always accurate.  So, for example, what do you immediately think if you see a punk rocker, resplendent in Mohican haircut and Nazi tattoos running down the street with a ladies handbag?  Most people assume  he has stolen the bag.  The fact is that he is running after the old lady who just left her bag at the bus stop.  That quickfire mistake is a form of psychological bias.

The third reason identified in this research was a real humdinger – it was lying.  Now, this was interesting and initially a little surprising.  Whilst I’m sure few of us are guilty of telling big fat lies at work, I’m sure you can all think of examples of when you told a little fib about things like costs, reporting deadlines and update schedules.  If you think you haven’t ever lied at work, you may have just lied to yourself – which is a fascinating topic in itself, but a little out of scope for today.

Moving on, like many people including the writer and scientific thinker (and one of my heroes), Douglas Adams, I enjoy technology.  However, and especially when we are talking about human interaction, he said: “we are stuck with technology, [when] what we really want is just stuff that works”.  Like the excellent Martyn Perks from this morning’s session, who suggested that productivity has flatlined over the past couple of decades, I also suspected that our organisations and corporate communications may not be operating better, despite technology levels being at their highest and most efficient levels in history.

So I asked myself, what could we do to help our communications to be more effective?

Initially, let me ask you all a question. Do you trust me?  Well, thanks don’t all rush at once.  OK, perhaps you could trust me for just for 15 seconds?

Now I’d like you all to close your eyes (don’t worry, Wedge isn’t allowed to move).  What I’d like you to to do is imagine a dog…..got it?  Now I’d like you to put that dog in a yard.  Ok?  Right thank you, you can open your eyes.  Normally at this point, I’d go round the room and ask everyone to share their vision.  However, given that there are so many of you, let me do this another way.  I imagine that the majority of you have just seen a picture of a dog that you have met before, perhaps from your childhood or a current dog and, if not, perhaps a famous dog like Lassie or maybe the Dulux dog?  Likewise, I’m sure that many of you will have seen your own garden or that of a family member or friend? I also suspect there are a few Walton-like, American picket fences out there and a smidge of Coronation Street brick yards?

Now, ask yourself what I just did and how did you responded.  I asked you a simple question, and you all answered it differently.  This is perhaps the most important point I will make today.  We all have psychological shortcuts built into how we perceive our environment and, whilst this may have saved our ancestors from advancing sabre tooth tigers, it means that we have to work extra hard to make sure everyone using our intranet or receiving our communications is seeing the same ‘dog in the yard’.

In fact, even with those simple words, some people see atypical things like ‘marihuana’ for a dog or a ‘yard of ale’ or ‘a length’ when I mention a yard.  Now just imagine the complexity of thoughts that would pop into your heads if I had asked you to think of overused corporate words like strategy, value or leverage? How many different versions do you think would appear then….?

This phenomenon is often referred to as ‘attention blindness’ and is something not helped by the sheer weight of information that is competing for our attention at any one time in today’s workplace.  I bet a few of you have even checked your devices during the short time in which I have been speaking.  That small action can result in your missing something important , and hence ‘attention blindness’.  So what can we do about this?

Well, the first thing one must do is to listen to what people are saying (or trying to say).  I believe this to be so important and indeed such an intimate response,  that I borrow from the poets and refer to listening as ‘touching at a distance’.

There remains no better environment in which to listen to one another than face-to-face.  I also doubt that science or technology will ever discover a better method or place for communication than the cigarette break….  The great thing about the old smoking place was that people from right across the organisation congregated there and chatted about what was going on with other smokers, regardless of their department or rank.  One of the drawbacks of today’s environment is that we tend to work from within our own little islands of interest, where we talk shop with people like us, and with similar perspectives.  I refer to this type of communication as narrowcasting.

Referring back to my scientific days, this is a bit like something called ‘adaptive radiation’.  There are circumstances when animal species, particularly in places like Australia, are isolated for so long that their physiology alters and they can no longer mate with other animals, with whom they used to mate. So, as I said at the beginning of this talk, communicating with others is not only good for your organisations, but it could even be good for your love life.

So how all this expresses itself is as human bias, which explains some of Flyverg’s findings.

Now, before I go onto my next point, do you recall the ripple which went around the room when Wedge introduced Rita Zonius as a New Zealander rather than an Australian?  Well, like the images here, there are some actions as well as words that immediately cause us to take a sharp intake of breath.  I call these ‘red moments’,  which I’m sure some of you are experiencing right now just by looking at the flags on the screen, alongside the word ‘referendum’ and with the image of Donald Trump.  It won’t surprise you that expressing support for the English football team in certain Glasgow pubs is another such red moment…

This is not a trivial matter and can have serious implications for the World, countries, organisations, projects, and individuals.

So how might we deal better with these red moments?  The first thing to realise is that telling someone that their facts/understanding are wrong, or that they are stupid, often has the opposite effect to what you may wish.  This is best explained by this 2300-year-old meditation from the philosophical movement known as the Stoics.  “Opinions are like nails; the harder you hit them, the deeper inside they go.” This principle, known in current day psychology as the ‘backfire effect’, suggests that some individuals, when confronted with evidence or opposing beliefs, come to hold their original position even more strongly.

To counteract this, firstly we have to appreciate that organisations, like biological organisms, are always evolving.  This suggests that they are always in conflict with themselves. Truth manifests in that conflict, but that truth is unstable and, as a consequence, always on the move. That is both a leader’s greatest dilemma and opportunity, and I believe this to be one of the reasons why bias and lying are such a barrier to change.

From this understanding, I believe we have to look for a new approach to communication that mitigates some of the biases inbuilt in us, and recognises the changing nature of our organisations.  This is a pretty complex challenge. However, I believe that some research carried out using the social media platform ‘Reddit’ and its ‘change my view’ discussion area, provide some promising practice for everyone engaged in communication.

This research, most recently highlighted by the writer and philosopher Daniel Dennett, suggests that dialogue, rather than debate, may help us overcome some of the difficulties and biases inherent in communication.  Positive dialogue seems to be supported by following four simple steps:

1. Re-express the other’s point of view so well that they may even say “I couldn’t have put it better myself.” I will mention ‘Q focus’ here, from the Right Question Institute, as a resource to help anyone interested in getting better at asking what the German poet, Rilke, referred to as “beautiful questions”
2. Next, we are encouraged to highlight any points of agreement with whom we are communicating.
3. Thereafter, we should state any learning we have identified from the discourse.
4. Only then should we express any criticism of the other’s point of view.

The Reddit research suggests that this simple process can create a positive environment for discussion and, even where it does not change someone’s mind, it seems to support further constructive discussion.

This is a powerful idea, and it’s fascinating that it mirrors the rules of Anatol Rapoport, the Russian-American psychologist and father of social interaction and game theory.

I sincerely believe that if we grasp this way of thinking it could have a Promethean effect on our communications. I hope you have found the past 15 minutes of interest and that it was time well spent.

I will leave the last words to another poet, George Bernard Shaw:

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Thank you

Scott

Sketchnote by Lisa Riemers.

• Read the wrap-up blog which includes all the review blogs and the photos.

It’s common to slate technology and state and restate that everything is about people. The rise of the phrase ‘digital transformation’ should remind us that the word ‘digital’ has very different meanings and any successful transformation requires new ways of working and employee support. Technology must enable employees, but employees must choose to accept tech solutions.

Erroneously, an organisation’s intranet is seen by leaders, and most people, as a tech solution. Mostly a communications platform. And let’s not be overly generous, it’s often seen as a broadcast solution; an internal website.

If a message has to be ‘sent out’, leaders barely care if it’s done via the intranet or email. It’s just about channel choice and the internal comms team will sort it out.

Intranets have a perception problem. Vendors, consultants, intranet managers and comms pros have been banging on about employee engagement, employee generated content, knowledge management, and collaboration for more than a decade,* yet intranets in practice are still judged by their home page, rather than the more useful sites behind. ‘Social’ is still a dirty word in many organisations and the focus is often on the permissions necessary to restrict employee actions. It’s so weird, seeing as so many employees are so disengaged they don’t want to do anything outside of their role.

This perception problem leaves intranets on the same par as email and your newsletter system. Ipso facto the intranet manager is perceived as a tech administrator. Even those embedded in the comms team or the digital team struggle to be recognised for the business impact of their work (outside launch projects). Perhaps the only way to break out of the admin role is to demand the job title of ‘digital workplace manager’ but I wonder how accurate this title is if the role holder has no oversight of the scores or hundreds of other applications different divisions use.

The common solution is for intranet managers to be dual role-holders; they must be multi-skilled and responsible for more than the intranet — they must be comms people, community managers, coders, visual designers, collaboration advisors, and information management experts. Otherwise, it will fall to a tech savvy comms pro to ‘pick up’ the intranet and liaise with IT as best they can.

So how do experienced intranet managers make progress in their career? Aside from enlarging their role until they can demand the title of ‘digital workplace manager’ (which may be accurate, or a laughable overreach) I suspect it’s all about moving to a bigger company.

The career path seems to be about taking your experience from the company that paid you for three years to another company that’s willing to pay you £3k more.

When your company refuses to invest in the intranet, in the improvement and better use of the intranet, I think moving companies is the best bet. Especially when the company is on the downward slope of centralising and cost reduction. Better to be on the upward cycle of decentralising and investing.

My point is, the role and career of intranet management is under threat, not by AI, not by apps, not by baby boomers or gen Z, not even by a lack of standard practices, but by the perception that the intranet is merely a channel, when it can be and should be the OS of the organisation.

Intranet managers should stand up for the evolution of the intranet;
Intranet managers, especially the dual role ones, shouldn’t be the ‘lone intranet person’, they should be part of a guild;
Intranet managers should come to Intranet Now – a participatory conference about what works.

*My comms and intranet career started around 2002; I worked for a global company, and we baulked at spending just £70k on a global intranet as we believed our requirement was to only have a home page for news.

This article was originally published on my rusting blog.

We’re pleased to have Gerry McGovern writing a guest post on the the need for diversity and collaboration in coding and design. This year we have worked hard to get more women on stage at Intranet Now and after we announce final speakers this week will will have more women on the agenda than men for the first time.

I saw my first intranet in 1997. It was not a pretty sight. I will never forget its “Feedback” icon. It was in the shape of a letterbox, from which suddenly a grabbing hand burst forth.

Being allowed to view the intranets and internal systems felt like being an investigator on Silence of the Lambs. ‘Ah, so this is where he tortures his victims.’ Because that’s what intranets and internal systems were, rubbish dumps and torture chambers. Many still are.

For years, I wondered why there was such a yawning divide between software designed for employees (enterprise software) and software designed for consumers. Why was so much enterprise software so utterly unusable, so incredibly badly designed?

A lack of commitment to delivering a quality employee experience by senior management is certainly the most important factor.

However, over the years, I noticed a pattern in the intranets that were striving to improve. There was nearly always a woman driving the change. Most often, this woman came from the Communications Department. She was tech-savvy and worked hard to build relationships with the IT Department.

Whenever I saw intranets that were delivering business value they were always collaborative efforts. It was IT working closely with Communications and HR and Support and Marketing and Sales. Working across divisions and boundaries and silos.

Traditional internal IT departments have been almost exclusively male dominated. Not simply male, but a very particular type of male. These hermetically sealed monocultures were like they were some sort of monastery where men could code in solitude, while sharing the occasional in-joke with their brothers. These monasteries of code delivered some of the worst software I have ever come across.

It is not wishful thinking but rather my constant experience that diverse teams deliver better software, deliver better customer and employee experiences. It is thus important to see the debate in Silicon Valley about the need for diversity as a critical one. The release of an internal document from a Google engineer challenging approaches to diversity within Google allows us to continue that debate.

The author of the Google piece makes the groundbreaking statement that there are undeniable differences between men and women. It is the differences we should celebrate, integrate and learn from. If we want software to work for the widest possible groups we must involve the widest possible groups in software development. A team with different genders, cultures and backgrounds delivers more usable, useful software.

One thing I noticed about the female champions of the employee experience is that they were often seen as troublemakers. Their desire to build bridges, encourage collaboration, put the employee first and help develop enterprise systems that actually worked, did not sit well with macho senior management culture. Men don’t like their monasteries being disturbed.

The old male world was: Listen to this leadership insight explaining how wonderful it is to work for us and how much we’d like your feedback telling us how great it is to work for us. And, by the way, we’ve just bought and installed a new sales management system. Pease learn how to use it by Monday latest.

Exclusive: Here’s The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320

Originally published 13th August 2017 on gerrymcgovern.com

Join us and celebrate Intranet Diversity at Intranet Now 5th October.  

Kurt Kragh Sørensen,  intranet/digital workplace consultant and owner of IntraTeam will talk at IntranetNow on October 5, 2017 about “What’s working – Results and insights from benchmarking 186 intranets  using IntraTeam’s digital workplace survey, showing how to get more value from your intranet and tools”.

IntraTeam has done surveys about intranets since 2001 and benchmarked intranet/digital workplaces since 2005. Now they have combined it all in an Intranet/Digital Workplace Self-Assessment Benchmark that has 299 questions divided into 19 categories:

• Strategy
• Communication
• Internal Social Media
• Integrations
• Governance
• Management Engagement & Support
• Mobile
• Apps
• Search
• Staff Directory

• Usability
• Navigation
• Analytics
• Language
• Content
• Collaboration
• HR
• Homepage
• ROI.

All participants get an overall score and a ‘spiderweb’ that compares each participant’s score in each category with the best in each category.

Highlights from the survey

193 mostly Danish organizations participated in the benchmark survey to date; 55 participants come from 9 other countries. The average organization have almost 12,000 employees. Some of the key findings are very revealing:

• The overall average benchmark score out of 100% was 21%
• The best scores were 55-60%
• Only 4% have a detailed intranet strategy (nearly 50% have no strategy at all)
• More than half resources (funding) for the intranet will remain unchanged this year; about 30% say they will see an increase in resources

• On average, the organizations have 1.1 full-time employees working in the intranet/digital workplace team per thousand.
• Almost half of the respondents use internal social media internally but only one in five of these say that it works well and one in seven say it doesn’t work at all.
• Nearly 50% have a mobile or responsive intranet (or app). One in five say these work well and one in seven say it doesn’t work at all. 93% of these have mobile access to internal news
• One third use microblogging e.g. Yammer and 69% of these use Yammer; 10% use Slack
• One in six have have an app for collaboration e.g. Yammer and one third of these say it works well. Almost nobody says it doesn’t work (3%)

• 63% use SharePoint or Office 365 in some shape or form
• 46% of the respondents say that their users see the intranet as their primary source for news and information
• 56% allow user commenting in news stories and four out of 10 of these say that it works well. Only 7% say it doesn’t work.
• Seven out of 10 claim to have intranets that deliver information that can be personalized by business unit, department and/or location. Three out of 10 of these say it works well.

105 of the 193 have had their intranet/digital workplace benchmarked in the self-assessment tool. “With a few exceptions, most have enjoyed answering the process answering the additional 200 questions” says Kurt Kragh Sørensen.

“The IntraTeam Self-Assessment Benchmark has a lot of very valuable and detailed questions. The assessment result gives you an insight into how your organization exploits the potential of a Digital Workplace,” says Thomas Maeder, Senior Digital Experience Manager, Swisscom.

The intranet/digital workplace survey/benchmark is available to organizations across the planet. If you wish to participate in the survey (the first part requires 10-20 minutes) then you will receive the survey results for free. If you participate in the full benchmark study (which requires 30-40 minutes), you get an overall score and the spider web graph (like the one below) showing how good you are in the 19 categories compared to the best in each category. Kurt recommends that you answer the benchmark with the whole team but then should be prepared to use more time depending on the time used for fruitful discussions. Two hours is a good estimate.

Example of the spiderweb that compares each participant’s score in each of the 19 categories.

More advanced reports and segmenting can be done by industry and organization size, for a fee. If you’d like to benchmark your intranet versus these organizations and all other participants  you can meet Kurt after his talk  at our World Cafe or write to Info@IntraTeam.dk or for visit the IntraTeam website.

Kurt will talk about the results and their meaning to digital teams at our conference in London, on the 5th of October.

Martin White kicks off this anthology of intranet wisdom for managers with a short history of intranets. He reminds us that the term ‘intranet’ was coined by Steve Tallen from Amdahl back in the early ‘90s and many of the issues that emerged then are still relevant today.

Sharing information over networked computers was a core theme of Tom Peters’ book, Liberation Management, published in 1992 and intranet teams are still trying to foster knowledge sharing and collaboration. Oscar Berg’s chapter “Collaboration and the Intranet” brings us bang up to date as he describes the creation of social intranets and why they are of fundamental importance to the development of intranets.

These two chapters form a fine bridge to the rest of the collection as intranet managers and thinkers tackle all manner of practical topics.

Marcus Österberg provides a starter guide to using analytics to help manage your intranet; “The time when major design decisions were made based on subjective measures, like  someone’s personal taste, is behind us” and although intranet teams might have a different current experience everyone needs guidance on analytics as the flow of available data to intranet managers increases. Marcus points out it’s easy to get lost in the data without asking ‘what is all this for?’. Fredrik Wacka and my chapters attempt to show just how much practical use facts and data can be in constructing and improving your intranet.

More approaches to design follow. Want to design to maximise your intranet’s impact on the business? Ingrid Domingue’s gives teams a way to design their intranet considering impact rather than the possibilities and limitations of current technology. Maciej Plonka looks at UX techniques applied to intranets including guerilla research techniques that are accessible for teams of even one or two persons.  

Without content there would be nothing to analyse, measure, or improve. Joop Van Loon and Christian Lustig guide us through the different types before providing a practical model for managing the how, what, and why of intranet content. Everyone wants their content to be engaging and two chapters deal with this topic; a real practitioner’s perspective from Nils-Erik Gustafsson with lots of everyday useful ideas and a holistic theoretical approach to engagement from Dan Jones and Kevin Cody. Every so often managers are confronted with the prospect of moving content to a new platform. David Hobbs describes the dangers of seeing this as a purely mechanical IT process at the end of a project, and provides concrete methods for planning and managing content migration. Good content is no use if you can’t find it and Kristian Norling poses the question – “Is good intranet search actually possible?” at the start of his chapter. He comes to a positive conclusion but adds that it takes a lot of hard work and determination. Provided you have both, then his chapter takes you through the necessary techniques and steps to having a good search function.

Modern intranets have a diverse bunch of publishers and contributors – How do you keep control whilst fostering collaboration and innovation? Mark Morell provides a reasoned case for good governance and explains how to make that case to management. Intranets often begin as ‘projects’ with multiple functions involved and lots of historically unsolved problems like gaps in directory services. Stephan Schillerwein outlines a specific project approach that tackles these issues. Stakeholder management is often quoted as a skill intranet managers should have; Sara Redin takes a deeper dive into this topic in her chapter with specific tools and best practices for identifying and managing stakeholders.

Martin White closes his chapter saying “The core good practice principles (for intranets) were well established by the end of the 1990s”. This book comes as a timely summary of much good work that has been done putting those principles into practice.

Book details

Intranets – handbook for Intranet managers

Kristian Norling Publisher and Editor

Brian Lamb Editor

Chapter Authors

Martin White

Mark Morrell

Sara Redin

Ingrid Domingues

Fredrik Wackå

Stephan Schillerwein

Maciej Płonka

Kevin Cody & Dan Jones

Nils-Erik Gustafsson

Oscar Berg

Joep van Loon & Christiaan Lustig

David Hobbs

Sam Marshall

Marcus Österberg

License

Photo credit Some rights reserved by Image Catalog

A late invitation perhaps, but we’ve been tweeing for a fortnight.

Come to our Xmas drinks evening in London on Tueaday 20th December, at Kings Cross in London.

Steven Murgatroyd thought internal comms pros needed a social catch up, and we thought they deserved a drink.

Thoughts and conclusions from observing Google and website search across similar tasks

Over the last three months I have been testing the website of a very large multinational organisation. The test procedure was simple; starting on the organisation’s home page, people were given a task such as “Find the report on Acme services for 2016” and I then observed as they tried to solve ten such tasks. The testing used the Customer Carewords Task Performance Indicator methodology.  

For a variety of reasons, search was the dominant tactic for solving the tasks. In fact over 80% of people chose to start to solve each task using search. This meant that I ended up watching 835 individual searches during the testing.

Each test started on the website home page of the organisation and 70% of the searches I watched  were executed using website search, that is, the search engine provided by the organisation for searching their site. However, in the introduction to the testing participants were told that they could use external search engines to solve their tasks if they wanted to. Many people chose to do this and about 30% of the searches used Google (two participants used Bing to search; no other external engines were used). This made it possible to compare search behaviour between website search and Google.

People who used Google were much more likely to solve the tasks. The 30% of Google searchers accounted for 45% of task success, meaning you were about twice as likely to get the right answer if you relied on Google.

So much so obvious. With R&D spending of $8 billion in 2013, Google is pretty serious about delivering better search results. I won’t discuss the reasons why Google search is better (there are plenty of articles on that), instead I’m more concerned with the user experience of search and drawing some conclusions about how intranet search teams can improve user experience.

The first thing I observed was that user journeys using Google and website search followed the same basic pattern (with different outcomes of course).

Observing this pattern again and again, I drew one major, obvious conclusion, two connected conclusions and made one conceptual leap.

Major conclusion: Google has moulded search behaviour. People act like website search is the same as Google.

I observed no measurable differences in the way that people used Google versus their use of website search.  Of course I could not tell what they were thinking as they searched, and there was no opportunity to follow up participants with questions about any decisions they were making, but what I observed was a homogeneous user journey (above) and a very low level of use of any advanced search features presented by website search. It seems reasonable to push this thinking a little further and add two further conclusions.

Two connected conclusions

1 People expect relevance

In the tests people expected relevant results to appear at the very top of the search results. People searched a lot; they persisted with search, changing terms, adding words, to try to get results that would help them solve the task. On average, people executed more than twenty searches during each test session over an  hour. They did not (with very few exceptions) go beyond the first page of results. Google of course uses PageRank to count the number and quality of links to a page and determine a rough estimate of how relevant a page is to a search term. Using the power of the whole web PageRank means relevant results are pushed to the top. Website search (and enterprise search) are bounded by the organisation and do not have tools of similar effectiveness to PageRank to increase relevancy. In the testing, people needed to tune their own results using ‘advanced search’ or filters to increase relevancy. But people fully expected website search to deliver the same level of relevancy as Google – and filters, which would have helped, were used only a handful of times.

2 People expected precision from the first search

People commented a lot about the search results during testing

“Using the (website) search is impossible because the results often do not match what you want.”

“I used a lot of words in the search box – but only found an answer infrequently – could be better.”

Website search results brought the whole set of documents and pages with words from the search query. Results were comprehensive but lacking a meaningful hierarchy of relevance (in search literature this is called being good at recall and poor at precision and it’s a ubiquitous problem in enterprise search). Google, on the other hand, is dedicated to increasing search precision using at least 26 separate algorithms to provide accurate results. People expected website search to be like Google.

The conceptual leap

Employees using internal intranet search behave the same way as people using website search.

Improving intranet search user experience

Armed with this knowledge, what can be done to improve user experience of intranet search? An arms race with Google to engineer better relevance and precision seems like a lost cause; instead, teams should consider a number of ways that the search experience can be improved by leveraging the fact that users behave like their search is Google.

1 Present filters like Google  

Presenting filters and advanced search features straight away at the side of the search results page might seem like an obvious good practice, but most people ignored the filters presented on the right hand side of the results page of website search in my study. Better to obey users expectation that filters are presented like Google, immediately below the search box, not in the left column or, even worse, the right column.

You can bet that this design is the result of research on the use of filters and it’s reasonable to assume that this way of filtering will be the way users expect to do it.

2 Present suggestions and best bets like Google

If you spell something wrong in Google you are presented with a spelling suggestion.

Experiment with presenting explicit messages in this way (exactly this way) on the second and successive attempts at search.  This messaging feature could also be used for ‘best bets’ and suggestions based on easily available research on search logs.

3 Start with fewer results

Although strongly counterintuitive to many teams, this technique can drastically improve relevance. Instead of starting with search results that index everything on the site, remove some results from the initial results page.

This is the reverse of the usual process of enabling the user to turn on filters to restrict results (in my testing very few people used this feature), instead it starts by excluding whole sets of results (PDF, Excel or other document types). Crucially, you must allow users to add these  back in if they want (again use Google’s message format on successive pages to do this).

Here we are, copying Google (at least in intention if not method) and their Penguin algorithm to exclude results that do not meet their standards

4 Improve titles

Of course, improving actual content is fraught with difficulty as it involves changing the practices of everyone who writes anything that is indexed by the search engine. Google, of course, has the market to do this for them (if you don’t follow the published guidelines on title and title meta tag then don’t expect to get found); a little SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) knowledge is necessary to get anywhere on the web.  Achieving this kind of wholesale bottom-up change is very difficult, but by focussing purely on title and first lines of content you could get plenty of bangs for your bucks in improving both precision and relevance.

One thing is certain for intranet search; you will not out-perform Google, so if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em.

This article was originally published on Linkedin Pulse.

Photo credit: Alan Stanton