Intranet Journal: The Top 10 Intranet Design Mistakes

Intranet Design

Top Ten Intranet Design Mistakes

By Vincent Flanders

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Mistake #2. Keeping unnecessary design items.

One of the main tenants of the security industry is, "Need to Know." If you need the combination to the safe, you get the combination; if not, you don't. In Web design the operative phrase is, "Need to Use." Do you really need to use that design element? If someone came in and removed an element, would the page be any less understandable? Almost all Intranets suffer from unnecessary design elements.

Occasionally, people can't grasp the concept of "Need to Use" so another way to view the issue is to ask the question "Would Amazon.com do it?" (use that design element.) Amazon.com has spent millions of dollars trying to make their site work as effectively as possible. Amazon doesn't want anything to get in the way of the sale. In an Intranet, you're not selling products -- you're "selling" information. Your coworkers are not visiting your Intranet for fun, but because they have to visit to do their job.

Eliminate the following frequently found design elements from your Intranets:

don't use spinning logos Spinning logos

Yes, spinning logos actually exist on Intranets. You'll see them when a group leader is also the designer (or thinks s/he is a designer) and no one wants or can tell the group leader the truth about the quality of the page. I often hear the comment, "My boss is color blind, he likes shiny objects, he's a moron and he thinks our Intranet looks great when everybody thinks it sucks.

don't use animations Animations

I can't remember seeing any animated images on corporate Intranets that were necessary although I'm sure there was an isolated case where its use was justified. Most of the animations I've seen are about as useful as this example. Also, be suspicious of anyone who prominently puts their image on a Web site <grin>.

don't use 3D graphics 3D graphics

3-D logos look tacky, don't they?

don't use music clips on your site Music

I shouldn't have to tell you most music files found on corporate Intranets are violating various copyright and performance laws. There's no reason to use music files on an Intranet unless you're a music company. (Photo of Roger McGuinn of the Byrds Copyright (c) 1996, Austin Chandler. Used with permission)

Cheap and/or ugly clip art

don't use cheap clip art Just because you can buy 1 billion clip art images at Costco for $29.95 doesn't mean you should.

Java

Sorry, your browser doesn't support Java. Once again, you have to ask the question, "Do I need to use this design element?" The answer is "No."

Large graphics

don't use large graphics

"What's wrong with you, Vincent, this isn't a 'large' picture?" Well, actually the above image is really 902 x 1072 pixels and takes up 121Kb of disk space. I've used a frequently used technique and I've reduced the height= and width= parameters of the IMG tag to 274 x 324 pixels to make the image "smaller" so it will fit a particular space. Designers believe that when they reduce the value of the parameters the angels come down from heaven and also reduce the physical size of the image. It doesn't work that way because the image is still going to be 121Kb. If you take the original image and simply reduce it to the size you want, you can cut the file size down to approximately 18Kb. Guess what? Your page will load faster.

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Mistake #3 Using the same design for the corporate Web site and the corporate Intranets

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Author

The creator of the award-winning site Web Pages That Suck and co-author of the book of the same name, lists the top 10 mistakes he's found while consulting for Fortune 1000 corporations. Hint: the image is one of them.
To contact Vincent with topics you'd like to see covered in the Intranet Design Guru Column or for any other reason: vincent@flandersenterprises.com