This Isn’t a Beauty Contest

Intranet design is not about design, stupid: An argument against putting too much emphasis on the design of your intranet.

That’s not to say that design (look-and-feel) doesn’t play a roll and isn’t important to users. Design is important, but it doesn’t crack the top 6 or 7 priorities. On average, based on my experience working with dozens of intranet clients, design is equivalent to between 8 – 12% of the total intranet’s value. What is really important is content (20-30%), search (15-20%), information architecture (20-30%), and governance and planning (20-30%).

I tend to agree. Intranets aren’t mean to be pretty — they’re meant to be functional. But that doesn’t mean they have to be ugly. The fact is, beauty can be found in purpose and functionality.

I wrote about something similar years ago over on Gadgetopia. I was talking about sites that use images for their navigation, rather than text.

Does the graphic content (or lack thereof) of a site contribute to a feeling of dynamism by site visitors?

When I visit a site heavy on the graphics and Flash, I get a feeling that the site is stagnant, because, as a Web developer, I know how much inertia is involved with changing that stuff. Text, on the other hand, is quick and easy to change, and it imparts the ability for a content development team to react quickly to new information.

The key for intranets is adaptability — how fast can it react to changing business requirements? Are we going to have to consult the design team and work up a bunch of Photoshop comps to figure out how our cool menus and graphics will wrap around the new content? Or is our design simple enough to just go, go, go? Is our relationship to the design relaxed enough that we can crank something out to meet the business requirement, and go back and clean it up if necessary?

Consider these screencaps Andrew McAfee got from Avenue A/Razorfish from their intranet. It’s clearly based on MediaWiki, and it retains the same purposeful simplicity of it. This is in contrast to a lot of intranets that try to emulate the major news organizations and their “lets cram everything on the page” mentality.