Thursday, January 25, 2007

Scent and Portals

As with other types of web pages, intranet portals succeed best when the scent to the employee's desired content is strong. However, because the portal engulfs all of the content from every site on the intranet, designers must take special care in their design. Time and resources for research and evaluation are necessary to guarantee a successful design.

We've seen, far too often, redesigned portals create only more frustration and lower satisfaction, because the team just guessed at what they thought the design should be without the necessary research or evaluation steps to ensure the design really meets the needs of the employees. These redesigns become an unnecessary and completely avoidable waste of valuable design resources. It's not hard to do design "right" -- it just takes planning, forethought, and an understanding of the basic theories, such as the role of information scent.



http://www.uie.com/articles/intranet_portals_scent/