Interaction Audit – test your page and create an objective diagnosis

Josh Williams from Hot Studio had a great speech at Web2Expo on reshaping ebay.

The two outstanding feature were:
he gave a definition of “feel” in “look & feel”
he introduced a well shaped method called Interaction Audit

The feel is an interaction groove - “It can be click-click-click oder clickp-hover-type or click-scroll-type – it does not matter, as long as you don't start to turn a telephone in an airplane cockpit.”
The target of controlling feel is not only to attract the user, but also to make him feel comfortable, so that he can reserve bigger parts of his mental bandwidth for the content of a site instead of it's technology.

In the interaction audit (which aims to check and harmonize the feel), they started with
* defining some example workflows: what do users do, what tasks do they perform on the way.
* that led to a task-activities matrix to find out similar activities in different tasks.
* Detailed descriptions of both were collected in a database
* The number and the number of variations in the interactions are now a criteria o quality (links, tabs, forms, mouseovers etc. - 16 different types of reactions/behaviours after you click on a link, 5 different types of forms ertc.)
* in addition to interaction inconsistencies, also task inconsistencies were analysed
* object inconsistencies as well.

This was a base that could be used to define targets, go through the enterprise universe and clean up.

What makes this so great?

It's all about structuring – shaping and describing a problem is maybe not solving it, but it's a good start to avoid it in the future.
There is no common taxonomy or reusable usecase for that – it's up to us to create the best practices and to find innovative ways and solutions.
As long as you don't forget your goals, there are never to many details – all those small pieces (if kept in a clear structure) will help you understand new problems that will keep arising every day.

Communication and Organization

It is great that intranets are developing into something way bigger than "just" a communication media. They are supposed to be collaboration and cooperation platforms, interactive tools and an interface to legacy systems and business processes.
The last one makes a really big difference: this is were you get from talking to acting. That sounds as if communication was nothing (well, it's my job, so dont get me wrong), but what I'm trying to tell is that usually communication sets the agenda and makes the decisions (things are determined a lot by the way they are told; think about new products, organizational changes, new managers) but in the case of representing business processes through the intranet, you learn a lot about the limited power of communication:

• you have to understand the processes
• you have to convince the process owners that they bother to explain the processes to you
• you have to represent the processes in a way that others can also understand them
• you have to create the communicative processes that surround the business processes; thats actually some kind of marketing activity
• you have to question yourself if all this is actually worth it or if the world would not be much simpler and clearer if business processes stay where they are and intranets are communication media.

To keep it short: I definitely think that it is way smarter to combine things and make them visible via one source. The intranet should be something like a trademark - brought to you by your Intranet. It's the first and single access point, and it provides all the information you need. Maybe not in all available depths, but it tells you were to go.