Determining Link Order on Intranet Portals
January 20th, 2006
In my recent article, Intranet Portals and Scent are Made for Each Other, I discussed the factors that make links on the portal page give off good scent:
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.
Several folks have asked what techniques we’ve used to determine the ideal order of links.
We’ve had good success on intranets with a rating system. Using the use cases/tasks associated with each link, we ask users to rate them on two scales:
- Is this an activity that is important to your work?
- Is this an activity that you do frequently?
(There are things that are frequent, but not very important, such as checking the lunch menu. There are things that are critically important when needed, but needed only once per year.)
We’ve done this with both binary scales (Circle the “F” or “I” if the use case/task is Frequent or Important) and Likert scales (1 is very infrequent/very unimportant, 5 is very frequent/very important) and not seen any real difference.
Your link order becomes a descending list of the combined scores.
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January 20th, 2006 at 5:58 pm
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?
Please give us all the juicy details!
January 21st, 2006 at 4:57 pm
[…] 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. […]
January 21st, 2006 at 7:39 pm
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)
January 27th, 2006 at 7:38 pm
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).
February 25th, 2006 at 10:48 am
[…] Determining Link Order on Intranet Portals by Jared Spool on UIE Brain. […]
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