The power of discovery: Why user research is critical for your intranet project

Why is user research, stakeholder research and discovery so important for intranet projects?

Intranet success and user research are intertwined. Here’s fourteen reasons why.

1. Building a user-centic intranet or digital workplace

Every successful intranet or digital workplace has to be centred around the needs of employees. They are the people who use the intranet in the day-to-day and it if doesn’t deliver value to them they simply won’t use it. Any intranet that is not user-centric will not meet its full potential to inform, engage and support productivity. Business stakeholders and intranet teams often have a reasonable to good understanding of the user problems that the intranet is trying to solve. But that understanding is rarely complete and also open to bias. There are also always nuances that can be quite subtle and will impact the design, scope and more. User research is absolutely critical in order to understand users and their pain points, preferences, habits, beliefs and more. Only from this understanding can you then design an effective intranet or digital workplace. As already noted, you cannot rely on assumptions about what your users want or need.

2. Getting the support of stakeholders so it is relevant and credible

Intranets meet the needs of users, but there will also be business priorities at an organisational level, as well as across different functions such as HR, IT, Communications, Knowledge Management and Operations. For example, perhaps the intranet needs to specifically drive more employee self-service around IT and HR tasks. As part of our research and discovery phase we also interview key stakeholders to make sure there is alignment between the intranet and the objectives of different functions. Stakeholder input provides an important strategic framing for your project that will determine scope and prioritisation; it will also influence detail such as the design and information architecture. Involving stakeholders in research also drives the buy-in which often proves critical for the delivery of the project, and alsos give your research and project credibility.

3. Establishing scope and related priorities

Intranets and digital workplace projects can be incredibly wide in scope, touching multiple aspects of work across the entire organisation. Working out the scope of your project is important, but it can be hard to know what to prioritise to ensure you deliver a successful intranet from day one. Many teams also choose to work with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) so the question of scope and prioritisation comes even more into focus. User research gives you more clarity over the prioritisation of your efforts as you can identify the biggest areas of pain, the low hanging fruit that will impact most users, the more niche cases that fall outside the scope of your MVP and so on. It can also help drive consensus across your project team and wider business stakeholders about what to focus on.

4. Killing silly requirements from individual stakeholders

Very occasionally individual stakeholders have some very specific ideas that are misinformed and not necessarily a good idea. User research is a good way to show a data-driven approach that will (hopefully) show that a particular idea is not necessarily a good one.

5. Deriving an intranet strategy, roadmap and requirements

Inevitably user research will prove to be a significant data input into some of the key documents of your intranet or digital workplace project – the strategy, any related roadmap and your functional and non-functional requirements. These will often reference directly back to your user research. In the projects we deliver we have a user research and discovery report which will make strategic recommendations and identify key requirements – all based on the research.

6. Designing for personalization and relevancy

Workforces are highly diverse and complex, with a wide variety of different roles, backgrounds, locations, needs, preferences and perspectives. One size does not fit all. Moreover, a successful modern intranet should be highly personalised and relevant for different groups with targeted content and experiences, usually based on a person’s profile. User research should always reflect the diversity of the workforce and be carried out across a representative sample. Undertaking user research helps you to understand the differences in how groups work and the relative nuances you need to make in terms of development, design, content and even change management interventions.

7. Ensuring your project is accessible

Accessibility is very important for any digital project and also supports Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I). Carrying our user research can uncover some of the pain points for people that are living with disabilities and need to be taken into account in building your intranet and digital workplace. Improving accessibility also improves usability.

8. Getting the detail right

Designing intranets and digital workplaces means often going into the detail. How do you decide on the best approach for user interface design, or a workflow process or even a piece of content? Returning to the detail of user research can help you get the fine-tuning right, as well as then further testing a design or solution with users.

9. Suggesting the backlog

Intranets and digital workplaces are never finished, and often deliberately so, by introducing an MVP. User research and stakeholder research will suggest multiple features, content areas and more. Some may be essential; others may be more nice-to-haves. One of the powerful outputs from any user research and discovery phase will be a backlog of changes, features and new capabilities that can define the fundamental roadmap for your intranet or roadmap for the short-, medium- and even the long-term.

10. Making the business case

Intranets and digital workplaces require investment and you may need to make a business case. User research will invariably produce data that can help make and improve any business case. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative data from user research is often the best way to influence hearts and minds. A killer statistic about a pain point or a direct quote from a user that expresses the frustration of using an existing solution can be powerful.

11. Supporting adoption and change management

Adoption and change management are critical ingredients of every intranet project. User research supports adoption and change management in two ways. Firstly, the user research will provide valuable information on how to launch an intranet – what to focus on, what kind of messages will resonate with users and so on. We sometimes have a specific workshop about change management to help form an effective engagement and adoption strategy. Secondly, carrying out user research is a form of change management itself. If users know they are being listened to it can create advocates and champions who may want to get more involved in the project in activities like testing, but also help to champion it after launch. Sometimes those involved in user research end up playing a critical part of your wider change efforts.

12. Setting up iteration, testing and improvement

User research often reveals those individuals and groups who may be willing to contribute further with feedback. As already noted, there is often a continuity between groups involved in initial user research who then give ongoing feedback to be able to iterate and test an intranet or application before launch, and then even improve it afterwards. Ongoing user research and testing also helps power more iterative development which helps to drive better products. For example, we  often use prototyping to be able to improve and iterate a design until it really ticks the right boxes for users.

13. Getting a baseline to track improvement and success

Measurement underpins efforts to improve an intranet over time. User research should give you baseline data to then re-measure later down the line to track success – comparing the “before” and the “after”.

14. Giving your project credibility

As an overall point, user research gives a project credibility not only with your stakeholders but also employees too. When everybody knows an intranet or digital workplace is based on a data-driven and user-centric approach, then everybody is more likely to take it seriously.