For a couple of months, we’ve been hinting at some major news and finally we can share the details with people outside our office. Our collaborative partnership with Habitat for Humanity International (HFHI) has landed My.Habitat 2.0 on the Nielsen Norman Group’s 2011 list of the Top 10 Best-Designed Intranets in the World! As developers, this is our Oscar moment.
Chosen from hundreds of Intranets worldwide, the 10 organizations with winning Intranets are headquartered in eight countries and have an average of 37,900 employees and intranet teams that average 14 people. The winning sites were chosen because they exemplify excellence and innovation in usability, design and performance.
To quote the Nielsen Norman Group (NNG): By reorganizing site content, breaking down site barriers and offering useful tools for sharing information, the HFHI team created an authoritative resource to support the needs of all of its 25,000 registered users, scattered all over the world.
NNG provides an in-depth analysis of the development of My.Habitat 2.0 in their rockin’ Design Annual, so I won’t go into it all here. But I will give our Solution Design process and Content Slammer their moments in the spotlight. They’ve earned it.
Shout-Out #1: NNG credits our Solution Design process as being a key component in defining scope through consensus and creating a blueprint for success. Distilled from our years of experience, this proven methodology brought key stakeholders across the HFHI organization and our team together for brainstorming sessions, focus groups and design sessions over several months to prioritize HFHI’s goals and explore our implementation options.
The end result of this collaboration was a comprehensive scoping document (a.k.a. the Solution Design) that clearly outlined big-picture objectives, top-level functionality, site architecture and our approach. As with all of our projects, the Solution Design was instrumental toward achieving institutional support and buy-in across the entire HFHI organization.
Shout-Out #2: My.Habitat 2.0 introduces a crucial innovation in the way content is managed and organized. Previously, all content was organized by the department that created it, so users often weren’t sure where to look. Content Slammer solves this problem by explicitly separating the ownership/management of content from how it’s browsed by users, allowing content to be organized much more intuitively. Content is also tagged with language and regional scope, so users can set their preferences and, as they browse the site, only see the information that’s relevant to them.
My favorite example to illustrate the advantages of this approach involves HFHI’s official policy regarding minors volunteering on a Habitat build. With the old site, users might think to look for this content in the ‘US legal’ site, the ‘Volunteer Management’ site, the ‘Youth Programs’ site or the ‘US Construction’ site. Where the content actually lived depended on which group(s) published it, but most users wouldn’t know that level of detail. In order for the content to appear on all of those sites, it would have to be duplicated, which would of course make management a nightmare.
With My.Habitat 2.0, it’s no longer relevant to end users who created a particular resource. Content is still managed by a host of different groups across the organization, but users can now browse all of it by topic or type of content. The information regarding minors volunteering on builds can now be found by browsing the topics “Legal”, “Volunteers”, “Youth”, “Construction” or “HFHI Policy”.
To learn more about My.Habitat 2.0 or how we might be able to help your organization, please give us a call. If you’re attending the Nielsen Norman Group Usability Conference in NYC in February, be sure to check out the HFHI presentation. I’ll be speaking about AW Systems’ role in developing one of the TOP 10 BEST-DESIGNED INTRANETS IN THE WORLD! (I just had to work that in one more time.)