Comments on: Determining Link Order on Intranet Portals

By: My blog » Blog Archive » Determining link order on intranet portals

My blog » Blog Archive » Determining link order on intranet portals — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 15:48:17 +0000

[...] Determining Link Order on Intranet Portals by Jared Spool on UIE Brain. [...]

By: Susan Steinway

Susan Steinway — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 00:38:05 +0000

I disagree that links should be ordered by importance. Importance to whom? To Tom “grape” is more important than “apple.” To Sally “banana” is more important than “apple” or “grape.” In a company of 12,000 employees, we order alphabetically on the intranet because we were constantly being told what was more important than the first thing on the list. Importance is determined by your role in the company and everyone’s role is slightly different. The one item that breaks this policy is the link to the timesheet, which everyone must fill out daily. It is out of order alphabetically on its list because it is most important to everyone. We also offer a portal interface that let’s users have a window of their favorite links, because everyone’s are different. Unfortunately, democracy didn’t work for us in our intranet design. We order alphabetically (in most cases).

By: spautz

spautz — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 00:39:02 +0000

Alan Cooper and Ellen Isaacs mention similar techniques in their books, although they use the term “necessary” instead of “important”, and they apply it to feature priority rather than the link order. It seems like some of the misunderstanding about these scales results from the ambiguity of “important”—would using the term “necessary” in your scale change its meaning?

If not, is the “determine necessity and frequency, and use that to determine significance” technique a general pattern which could be applied elsewhere? Are there any areas where that general pattern might be inappropriate or detrimental? (aside from places where there’s already a well-established convention for order/priority)

By: My blog » Blog Archive » UIE Brain Sparks » Blog Archive » Determining Link Order on Intranet Portals

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 21:57:15 +0000

[...] UIE Brain Sparks » Blog Archive » Determining Link Order on Intranet Portals Link order is also very important. Well-designed portals put the most important links at the very top and order the remaining links by priority and need. In our studies, poorly-designed portals often resort to alphabetical order, which confuses employees as they expect related links to be group together with the most critical functions near the top. [...]

By: Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Jesper Rønn-Jensen — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 22:58:17 +0000

I think I misunderstand your scales: As far as I understand, an unimportant task that’s used very frequently gets the same score as an important task used infrequently.

Shouldn’t the important task score higher?
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