Client Context
Over several years, this client had spent several million Euros on various eBusiness projects, including extranets for its suppliers and partners, business units' intranets and public Web sites. However, most of these projects failed to meet the company's expectations and objectives. As a result, senior management became very sceptical about supporting or budgeting any additional eBusiness projects. Nevertheless, the director of IT was determined to solve what he viewed as a major corporate problem: A number of intranets across the company duplicated information, while failing to adhere to a standardized corporate message and design. So IT initiated a project to develop a new intranet that would become the common and corporate-wide communication platform for all employees.

Why an external usability expert?
Due to the failures of the past eBusiness projects and the resistance of senior management to such projects, the IT director wanted to be sure that employees across the globe would use the new intranet as their prime communication medium. So IT looked for an external partner who could:

• Provide neutral expertise in intranet design to ensure that the new release would meet employees' expectations, while minimizing their learning curve.
• Review and validate high-level and detailed specification documents and prototypes for the new intranet release.

Our fact-based, objective and industry-proven methodology in intranet design, covering hundreds of design and content aspects, convinced the client to choose us as its external partner.

The Engagement
Our engagement consisted of three steps:

• Step 1 - Intranet Design Best Practice Workshop: The best practice workshop on intranet design determined the intranet steering committee's visions, ideas and approach to intranet site design. The steering committee was composed of representatives of all business lines and corporate functions, including HR, IT, Corporate Communications, Finance and Marketing. During this one-day workshop, the analyst presented best practices using real-life examples (as annotated screenshots) of successful design concepts and explained how to use our intranet design methodology. Throughout this workshop, the client team discussed these various design concepts and, with the support of the analyst, saw how they could use these approaches to achieve their own design and business goals. After this workshop, the intranet team had a common, deeper understanding of intranet design and a common framework (real-life examples, methodology) to help in planning the new intranet. The deliverables for this step included more than 120 annotated screenshots demonstrating real-life best practices in intranet design and an explanation of our intranet methodology incorporating more than 250 design and content points.
• Step 2 - Intranet Specification Validation: After this workshop, the client team developed the high-level design specification documents. The analyst validated these documents prior to asking an external company to build a prototype including scenarios for employees and content editors. This validation ensured that the decisions made during the numerous internal discussions were aligned with both design best practices and the company's intranet strategy. The deliverables of this step consisted of annotations within the specification document to highlight unclear specifications that could be variously interpreted, missing specifications and specification mistakes.
• Step 3 - Validation of Prototype: The last step involved validation of the detailed intranet specifications for construction of the prototype and clarification of any ambiguities within the documents. This validation ensured that the external company built the prototype according to the client's specification. We then presented the prototype to selected user groups. The deliverables for this step consisted of annotations in the specification documents.

Client Value
As a result of our methodology the client has been able to reduce the timeframe of its specification effort by more than 50 percent, when compared with previous eBusiness projects. We were also able to reduce time and effort required for final testing of the developed intranet release. This was due largely to the checklist format of the methodology, which was invaluable in verifying usability and design aspects of the site prior to launch