Blog | 11 February 2020
6 lessons learned about web and intranet – the thinking of three major government agencies
How do you think about the content and functionality of an intranet for 6,000 employees? How do you make it really deliver value to your visitors? And how do you go from lots of code to reusable components? These were some of the things that 100 people from Swedish government agencies discussed during the first meeting of Sitevision's new government network. And of course, you get to share some of the tips.
1. Listen to your visitors
The CSN's first piece of advice was to find out what your visitors' needs are. What do they want to know? What do they want to be able to do on your website? Measure, A/B test, be responsive and make it easy to give feedback by always asking: "Did this page help you?".
2. Create a customer service team
Gather representatives of everyone who has some kind of customer contact and make sure to meet once a week. At CSN, they go through what is current, what questions are common right now and what content needs to be raised to answer customers' questions. They then work on the basis of the customers' views to constantly improve the content.
3. Set the framework and test early
When developing a new intranet, the Swedish Tax Agency advised you to formulate acceptance criteria that everyone agrees on from the start. Then start testing early in the process, so that you have time to adjust the solutions without affecting time and quality.
4. Do fewer things better
With 14 websites to manage, the Swedish Tax Agency also advised choosing one solution. So, think about what need you are going to solve and how to do it in a really good way instead of several half-baked ones. It saves time, makes the function more valuable to visitors and the websites will be easier to manage (especially if you have 14 of them).
5. Clean up the intranet – it's not an archive
The Swedish Migration Agency told us about the road to their new intranet. A smart tip? Have routines for cleaning the intranet. When a page has been published and untouched for ten months, an email goes to the page owner saying that it is time to review the content. If it is not updated within two months, a warning box is added to the page that the content may be out of date.
6. Use social features
Allow visitors to comment on pages, join groups and otherwise communicate with each other. Don't worry about a bad atmosphere – instead, see it as a way to capture dissatisfaction and act on it. The Migration Agency said that very few people will abuse the function, while it gives more to the others.