In our last blog post, we talked about how graceful change can be an idea that applies not only to buildings, but other things built, including websites. We described the idea of shearing layers in websites as a way to determine what parts of a site should change, and with what relative frequency. These included Purpose, Information Structure, Containers, Transactions, Wayfinding, and Content.

One type of website that lends itself well to the managing shearing layers is the intranet community. These are the ultimate “living” digital places, and they are notoriously difficult to manage even as they gain traction and usage in an organization.

The management of these communities highlights the essential brittleness of most website architectural thinking. Here is a site that people are living in, and it is imperative that their information structure and containers remain stable, even if navigation or content is adjusted. Essentially, we don’t want to destroy their world, but most site redesign processes do exactly that.

This is especially true because internal sites are almost invariably the cobbler’s children of organizations. While seen as important, they usually don’t get the time, budget, or support to make major changes.

So, intranet and community sites demand incremental learning, and to do that, it’s important to find the shear layers that compose them in order to figure out what can be effectively changed, and when.

A great candidate for incremental site improvements is navigation. Poor findability for intranets is a common complaint. Navigation and search is often poor, and when navigation does exist, users often feel like they are overloaded, with too much to choose from and difficulties finding what they are looking for. As a result, a lot of things from "different levels" are often next to each other in an alphabetical list. Essentially the navigation of intranets often is like a garden that had gotten overrun with weeds and needed some order enforced on it, even if the underlying content does not.

This often turns out to be a very straightforward affair; organizations are, well, ORGANIZED. The real challenge is in getting alignment ends up being two-fold:

• getting agreement about what major concepts are going to be the ones that buttress a site’s navigation, and

• not overwhelming users with options or categories that are not organized in a thoughtful way for quick orientation to the right work spaces.

Using standard card sorting procedures of identifying navigation categories, you can get help from subject matter experts by identifying what any given term is and the nature of this content. The terms needn’t be formally dropped into categories, at least initially, but getting understanding of what it is for can help identify emergent structures as well as validating assumptions about the organization’s structure that might inform navigation choices.

From this starting point the richness inherent in any organization can be managed underneath the top-level navigation with ample cross-linking and tags. Approaches like this can change a long menu with dozens of topics to one that was only four items and fit on people's screens, which contain submenus with a handful of other options.

The responses we’d like to hear when working on the navigation shearing layer should be a broad embrace of the new navigation and relief that bigger things hadn't changed. "I'm glad the changes weren't more drastic", because it still worked for their prior vision of the world.

We have found that, with careful approaches to focus and intent, the navigation of a site can be profoundly improved without making major shifts to the data structure of the site or its containers. However, the best way to make this change is to expect that it will happen as the site is being initially architected and designed. The concept of sharing layers helps web planners figure out what parts of a site will change, and in what general time frame, and plan accordingly.

This is only one of numerous, incremental changes intranet owners can make to improve their communities, but it’s typical in that it reflects several core concepts:

• It is specific to a user need at a specific point in their internet experience - in this case, wayfinding.

• Changes to this layer reflect a change in the understanding of this particular part of the user experience, but not necessarily all of it.

• The change should improve and buttress other parts of the site that are not under significant change right now.

If you are curious how shearing layers might apply to your intranet, or if you just have questions about making intranet communities better in general, drop us a line!