Intranet Review Toolkit

About the Intranet Review Toolkit

This intranet review toolkit provides intranet managers and designers with an easy-to-use method of assessing the strengths and weaknesses of their intranet. It contains a substantial set of heuristics (guidelines or criteria), allowing a detailed intranet review to be conducted that focuses on a wide range of functionality, design and strategy.

While there are a number of published heuristics for reviewing public websites, up to now there has been no equivalent set for corporate intranets. Initially supported by an IA Institute Progress Grant, Step Two Designs have developed and published this comprehensive set of publicly-released intranet heuristics.

The Intranet Review Toolkit has been published under a Creative Commons license, allowing it to be freely downloaded and used (as long as certain conditions are met).

The Intranet Review Toolkit covers eight aspects:

• intranet home page
• site structure and navigation
• search
• page layout and visual design
• intranet content
• news
• staff directory
• intranet-based applications
• intranet strategy and management

The Toolkit can be freely downloaded from this site, and has been provided in both Word and Excel formats. The Word document contains the full heuristics plus supporting descriptions, while the Excel file is designed to be used as a quick summary. In both documents, space is provided for comments against each of the heuristics, and a total score is calculated for each of the sections.

"Excellent resource, highly recommended. Well done James and team."

Andrew Mitchell

The commentary

The downloadable Toolkit is now supported by a steadily-expanding commentary, which provides supporting information and resources for the heuristics. This is designed to provide more information than can reasonably be fitted into the Word document, as well as addressing comment questions and points of debate.

It is our hope that the commentary will grow to become the single most comprehensive resource for the design of intranets, although much work is required first. In this early phase, you can help us greatly by asking questions or making comments, which will help to guide us when expanding the commentary.

In a future phase, we hope to throw open the commentary for wide participation (we’ve therefore used a wiki as the base publishing technology), but want to first build up enough of a critical mass of content. As we progress, we will progressively explore ways of more directly involving the intranet community, so watch this space!

Using the Toolkit

The Intranet Review Toolkit can be used in many ways:

• identifying opportunities for incremental improvement
• targeting redesign efforts
• building a business case
• benchmarking against other intranets
• ensuring balance in intranet efforts
• validating a new design

About Step Two Designs

The Intranet Review Toolkit is maintained by Step Two Designs, a vendor-neutral intranet and content management consultancy based in Australia. We are recognised as the global thought-leader in intranet strategy, and have published an extensive library of intranet and content management articles.

We are also the publisher of a number of best-practice reports and resources, such as the Intranet Roadmap™, Improving Intranet Search, Staff Directories and Content Management Requirements Toolkit reports.

Our goal in all the work that we do is to help organisations to build the internal knowledge and expertise regarding intranets, usability, information architecture and content management. This is reflected in the articles we have written, the workshops that we run, and the reports we have published. We also provide a mentoring programme, to offer ongoing support and assistance to intranet teams.

A message from James Robertson

Consider this Toolkit a work in progress. It is far from perfect, and while many of the heuristics are self-obvious, others will be controversial or debated.

Despite any shortcomings, I hope this Toolkit will be beneficial for organisations of all types. Two overriding goals drove the creation of this Toolkit:

• To help intranet managers assess the state of their own intranets, to identify potential improvements, and to build a stronger business case for further intranet improvement.
• To help the intranet community as a whole define and refine the concept of the "best practice" intranet, and to provide a basis for constructive discussion and consideration.

There will be many future versions of this Toolkit produced, with each release refining the heuristics or adding new heuristics as the concept of "best practice" continues to evolve.

I therefore encourage you to try the intranet review toolkit in your own organisation, and to contact us with your suggestions, comments and ideas.

The wider the involvement, the faster the intranet community can drive forward the concept of the "best practice" intranet. There is much still to be learnt about designing and managing intranets, and I hope that this toolkit will play some small part in supporting this learning and growth.

James Robertson
Managing Director, Step Two Designs

Colophon

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