Intranet Bikkels

An intranet is the one piece of software in a company that everybody has to use and nobody chose. Bikkels had one, built in SharePoint, and people were in it constantly. They also could not find anything in it. It was cluttered, and getting from one page to the page you actually wanted took knowing where it was already.

That is not a content problem. Nothing was missing. It was a naming and structure problem, and those cannot be fixed by whoever built the thing sitting down and having a think, because they already know where everything is.

How it was worked out

Card sorting, with the people who use it. Two questions, both of which only they can answer: which actions do you actually perform, and what would you call them?

The answer is a structure built out of the words staff already use, rather than the words the organisation uses for itself. The images here are the starting situation and the first design iteration that came out of it.

Alongside that, the job was translation: sitting between the technical staff and the designers through brainstorm sessions, turning what people said they needed into requirements someone could build from. That was most of the work at Bikkels, where I had been taken on as a development consultant and client placements did not materialise, so the internal projects became the job.