Balancing Content and Tools

When users turn to your intranet, do they need to find information, or accomplish a task? The answer is both: A good intranet provides solutions to both of these challenges. So how do you strike a balance between these very different objectives?

Here are a few ideas to spark thoughts and discussion among your team:

• Display a ‘Toolbox’ with links to functional elements
• Place content in a knowledge base with its own ‘brand’
• Identify tools with a specific icon or other visual cue
• Clearly define what a ‘tool’ is for your users: Typically a tool would consist of an electronic form which gathers one or more pieces of information, processes those data, then produces some sort of output or outcome (e.g. a Change of Address tool whose outcome is that official paperwork is routed to your new address when you move, a financial report whose output is a printable list of results for a range of dates, or a ticketing system whose outcome is the resolution of a technical problem)
• Design the UI in such a way as to guide users to make the choice between information seeking and task completion up front
• Make universal search the sole – or primary – route to content, while using a navigational structure to guide users to specific tools (i.e. HR tasks are available in the HR section, IT tasks under IT)

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