We did a survey on what people hate most about their intranet. The results? Two key gripes: irrelevant content and poor usability. We’ve studied these problems closely and have created a new kind of intranet that solves them.
Irrelevant content
Irrelevant content has been the death of many a traditional intranet and is becoming a burden for social intranets. Here’s why:
Dumping grounds for content. Traditional intranets often deteriorate into dumping grounds for files that quickly become disorganized and out of date.
- Jostle solves this by organizing key content in a structured way, making content ownership clear, making it easy to publish content to specific employee groups/teams, and providing universal searching.
Heavy reliance on streams. Social intranets also have big issues with irrelevant content. The problem here often relates to their heavy reliance on streams (users posting to a topic that other users follow) for content sharing and discovery. Soon you have a clutter of streams to navigate with no clear way to find any particular piece of information.
- Jostle solves this by providing an integrated suite of internal communications tools since communication happens at many levels in an organization. We don’t rely on streams for information discovery.
Poor usability
Poor usability has also led to the downfall of many intranets. There are several roots to this problem:
Intranets get stuck on old technology platforms.
- Outsourcing your intranet to a leading cloud-based provider like Jostle solves this one.
Information architecture gets broken. Smaller companies that use build-it-yourself platforms lack the required expertise from the get go. Larger companies employ consultants to get it right out of the gate, but then hand their intranet over to in-house IT who quickly break the intended architecture by bolting on widgets and new page structures. Intranets built using SharePoint are particularly prone to this problem.
- Jostle solves this by locking down navigation and usability so it’s always optimized and cannot be broken. This makes it possible to consume information always in context of person, location, and team.
Excessive use of links. The home page of many traditional intranets have upwards of 100 links on them, creating a terrible user experience.
- Jostle’s turnkey navigation eliminates the need for links like this.
Lack of clear content ownership. Most intranets make it easy for content to be dumped in and then forgotten.
- Jostle makes it easy for subject matter experts to look after their own content and makes this content ownership responsibility clear for all users.
Curation is hard. It takes more than just clear content ownership to keep things fresh. Regular removal of what content is not being used or is out of date is critical.
- Jostle builds simple curation tools into our platform.
Perhaps most importantly, Jostle focuses on people first. When you want help it’s normally a person you’re looking for, not what they wrote three years ago or a dated document stuck in an arcane filing system. If you want an intranet that you’ll really love and use, consider Jostle. You won’t look back.
