The “mobile first” intranet (part 5)

From now on you are Jill D, a newly employed barista at the XCoffee company. The coffee shop is situated at Kings Road and XCoffee has a lot more coffee shops in the whole country.

(This is the fifth part of the blog series The “mobile first” intranet. See previous blog posts for discussions about the basic page design, header, bigfoot, warnings, content page and navigation page.)

A great intranet should be a business system for enhancing the general efficiency and a dashboard for accessing the rest of the digital workplace. The homepage should reflect this.

Often the things most close to you are the most important things, and therefore we start with this.

1. The local coffee shop

As a barista you need

• A lot of info about how things work in the local coffee shop, what the local routines are.
• Info from your line managers Helen L and David W.
• Some kind of area where you can post messages to your coffee shop colleagues and discuss work (and other stuff).

All this helps you in the every day work in the coffee shop.

Let’s make a tile of this local ”We stuff” on the homepage!

Check it out live (works in ALL devices! Some bugs in IE10/11.)

Note that you can post a message or start a new discussion directly from the homepage (via the green “Create new” buttons).

2. My own stuff

In the line of work, you also need

• Access to a few business systems, especially the HR system, because you are on flexitime and need to register your time.
• To remember to do certain tasks at certain dates, so it would be great with some kind of ToDos function.
• Quick access to intranet pages you use especially often.

Let’s build another homepage tile with this ”Me stuff”.

Check it out live (works in ALL devices! Some bugs in IE10/11.)

Note that you can flex in and out directly on the homepage (since an intranet should make it easy to do ordinary stuff).

3. Bi data

It might also be a good thing to have some BI data, especially if you can relate to the trends (e.g. local coffee shop sales, team sick leave statistics, local waste). Of course general company figures are also good to know about.

So we add a Bi tile to the homepage.

Check it out live (works in ALL devices! Some bugs in IE10/11.)

4. Corporate news

Corporate news is also important for you – if the news is ”need to know” news, necessary for ”surviving” the work day. Some ”nice” news could also be acceptable if most of the news is ”need”.

• Global company news.
• Division news.
• A few featured news pieces.

(Communications departments often think this tile should be the first intranet homepage tile, but my experience is that the end-users want services, tasks and work-related stuff more than corporate news.)

Here is a news tile.

Check it out live (works in ALL devices! Some bugs in IE10/11.)

5. New at work

As a new employee there are some basic things you need to learn. You need info about the company culture, code of conduct, how to deal with difficult customers, routines and so on. Since the intranet is personalised it can detect you’re a new employee and therefore you see a tile with

• Welcome message from the CEO.
• Info about the core values.
• Other basic things important to know and learn.

This tile should only be on your homepage in the beginning, with some function for you to turn it off, because three months from now, you probably know all the basic stuff.

The New at Work tile.

Check it out live (works in ALL devices! Some bugs in IE10/11.)

Additional features

I think I’ve put the tiles in the right order for you. But of course it could be that you would prefer another order. Or maybe you are a person who like to hide stuff you do not need for the moment? Let’s add the possibility to move the tiles, hide them, and some tile help.

It’s really crowded in the tile headers in the mobile, but as soon as the width allows it, you can add legend texts for helping the end-user.

 

 

The homepage with collapsed tiles and one help triggered.

Next blog post, The Mobile Intranet (part 6) – A section start and Jill becomes a manager, will be posted in September/October.