Recapping a discussion from Twitter about intranet, platforms and people. it's 2012 —shouldn't this go the other way around, and technology adapt to people, not the other way around?

(see nearly the whole thread by clicking Perttu's original tweet up there )

Basics of this discussion from my point of view: Customers want kick-ass intranets, and they sometimes use digital agencies to design the information architecture and the user experience. After that they select the system (or the system can be already selected to be SharePoint as is often the case in Finland and elsewhere). This sometimes results to quite difficult situations when the implementation cost for the the user experience that the agency designed starts becoming visible. A project that was 50k implementation before the digital agency has become a 200k implementation project. And only since there are these amazing UI elements and rounded corners everywhere and amazing "content streams" that are personalized to every user.

And to solve this problem... Here is my number #1 suggestion:

1) Digital agencies that don't have any real understanding how knowledge work (or process work) happens inside large organisations should not try to use their UI skills to solve these problems. In most cases they are not UI problems, and by trying to solve them with UI design just creates more complexity.

So if you are a skilled digital agency and your projects are 90% about internet sites and custom applications I recommended that you do not answer to intranet related requests if you are not absolutely sure that the project is your cup of tea. (I know that im dreaming here since 90% of digital agencies will happily even do a CRM redesign project if asked.)

2) Many intranet products (eg. SharePoint) have a philosophy integrated into them. They truly have somekind of design inside them so that they guide users into doing stuff and making things happen. They are not frameworks that can be used as a basis for any service. Especially SharePoint truly has an "intranet philosophy" behind it, and an intelligent designer should grasp that philosophy before going into "navigation system redesign mode".

All this sounds to me the platforms seem quite inflexible and near obsolete?

1) BYOD, consumerisation of everything. People are getting used to good design and fluid experiences everywhere, so why should they suffer with an near-obsolete platforms at work?

2) If "rounding corners" and personalising content to quadruples the project cost, doesn't that mean it would be easier to start with a blank slate, possibly from open source to begin with?

As a digital agency you can make a new themes for the templates, you are free to help the client with the information architecture - but in any of those scenarios you need to understand how SharePoint works as an intranet system. Especially since SharePoint is not really a CMS. It is much more about "enterprise product aimed to solve intranet and document management related problems".

And you should not employ a "creative design agency" to help you implement an enterprise system. You can benefit for using that kind of agency, but you should make their role clear. Their job is to create the vision and quality standards. If you want more, then agency needs to understand the chosen intranet system deeply.

So there are my two suggestions.

My experience is that most clients don't want to bend the intranet system to do crazy stuff. They want it to deliver good editing experience, news center system, commenting / discussions and project management / team site related stuff. And the faster they can get this the better. The least they are interested of going into a agile process and start defining how they want their news center to work.

Clients don't care whether its open source or not. The question is about level of features and usability out of the box. And this is one reason I see digital agencies thinking this intranet thing the wrong way. They see it as more custom system than the clients see it.

Also, that blatant generalisation on "(creative) digital agency." Any good agency starts with the people and things they need to do with the intranet, not the feature list of any given package.

You're partially right, solving transformational problems with UI design might cause more complexities. But it also might make the Office Joe's life a lot easier.

A proper design agency first finds out the right questions to answer, then answers them and just after that starts designing an UI. For example, the GDD process originated at Cooper is actually pretty good on designing complex software. The what's painful for platform providers/IT corporations, this people-led way of working tends to start with needs, not features. Apart from creating the strategic part, an important part for design agency is to own the design throughout the implementation. Worst cases usually happen when design gets muddled with non-led decisions on the fly.

I have seen good stuff delivered by creative digital agencies. User stories and understanding the Office Joe's daily challenges are always useful stuff to do. Ideally that kind of process brings a lot of improvement ideas and helps to scope the project. Great stuff, nothing to complain about.

The bad sides that I see too often are:

1) Digital agency has started producing wireframes really fast. And their end deliverable has to be a graphical UI design or a prototype. Even when they haven't even started to understand the problem they are facing. Ok, granted, this is as much of a client-related problem. But still.

2) Digital agency wants to solve everything with the intranet service. And this often means that even meeting room bookings should be done with the intranet UI even though the client organisation can have other perfectly good alternatives for that.

And those personalization visions are usually very much minority report stuff that don't have any connection to the realities of that organisation (starting from the fact that the organisation might not even have that kind of groups existing about their employees).

I think intranet design is not so much about designing complex software systems. It is about designing for an ecosystem that always has multiple systems in place. And this kind of designing is really challenging work - and definitely something that any skilled designer can do - and it is much more about those needs, people and the existing ecosystem of IT systems than it is about wireframes and other UI design tools.

Also the budget limitations are much more concrete with intranets than they are with many other areas. Even though you find out important problems to solve - and even when you have good solutions for them - the money rarely gets any bigger. So you just have to deal with the limitations you have. This is probably the biggest reason why I argue here so much in favor of products and not so much in favor of building custom solutions that really make users life easy.

I don't really argue about my process and attitude being better - I just think that very few real clients can afford your kind of attitude when it comes to intranets. And even for them it would probably make sense to use products in areas where good products exist.

The heart of the problem: a) customers don't have the money to solve their intranet problems through good design process and custom software development. b) good products that solve these problems for many clients at the same time don't really exist.

So we are stuck with a world that is not perfect (=SharePoint). :)

How about the other end? If what matters is cost efficiency and communications, wouldn't the clients be better of with Basecamp, and a custom-built Wordpress instance? :)

Let's turn this around again. Why couldn't the expensive & extensive enterprise level intranet platform be less rigid?

If the platform would just provide the features and connectivity (ways to integrate to other systems etc), and be UI agnostic, wouldn't intranet projects be more about solving each organizations own specific problems? Instead of trying to make a rigid system bend, and the client with it.

Of corse, the realist in me knows that there is a certain mentality that goes with the "enterprise" world, and that Sharepoint often gets chosen.

Oh and, being UI agnostic doesn mean you couldn't have some defaults for the cases where no "creative digital agencies" were involved :)

lending a western voice to this one. Thanks Sami.

I've worked for agencies for over a decade and done a fair share of 'intranet' projects. (note: my experience is for fortune 500/global companies) Some good, some not so much and the one thing that I can say about the discussion is that you are over-simplifying extremely deep ecosystems and the interactions of employees by asking if it's a people or software first problem.

Because it's rare that an IT department choses Sharepoint based solely on what you might call an 'intranet' I don't think it's really fair to comment on that as an agency.

The other thought is that UI, in the case of User experience on intranets, has not been what I consider to be the larger issue with platforms

What I spend a lot of time helping clients with is meeting employees where they already are.

So where are the employees?
Email
Online
Chat/Messenger

The real question becomes how to bend platform strengths for those channels....

And that is a great place for an agency to be. IMO.

Agencies need to understand that 60% of their value to a client is in user psychology.

That's probably very true. And I'd imagine every case is different — we're no "intranet specialists" by any means, but a lot of the work the do tends to gravitate around large corporate IT systems, sooner or later. I'd imagine the scale differs quite a bit between a F500 corporation and a Finnish equivalent, or even smaller.

What I mean with people first is that it's a lot about making people's daily work easier. I've seen projects where an instance / a part / tentacle of Sharepoint has been bent to shape as a data platform for network operators. Visually beautiful, and a delight to use as well. So far the results have been very promising in terms of less errors, more efficiency etc. Sometimes the emphasis on design is worth every cent.

we are in agreement Sami. At the very core is 'making life easier'.

For reference I have a client right now that has part of the intranet is Sharepoint, another part in .NET, another in JIVE, and finally a bunch of PERL just running jobs that power any front end you want. Our job is to make whatever piece we are dealing with easier.

Regardless the platform: Beautiful things work better - Norman