Whether you’re starting a new partner extranet, revising your support site, or launching a new collaborative intranet, there are a number of things that can completely sink your project, and lead to all kinds of customer complaints, wasted effort, or worse.

Here’s a quick round-up of 5 things that can kill a web project, and how to avoid them…

#1 No documented governance

When building any web application primarily driven by user-generated content, it is essential to document the governance process by which content will be updated and added, who will have access to update the content, and who will decide when content needs to be removed or refreshed.  Without this documentation vetted and signed-off by all interested parties, you may find yourself in a negative situation where the true content owners within your organization don’t have sufficient control over the process to update content within your web application.  The end result: content may be inappropriate to the audience, or may not be updated frequently enough.

#2 Lack of required content

Every good extranet or intranet lives and dies by its content.  Without useful content either being created by entitled owners or consumed by a target audience, there is simply no way that your web project will succeed.  It is important to regularly survey your audience to insure the content you have in your extranet or intranet meets the needs of your audience.  It’s also ideal, if possible, to find a select screening group of users or audience members that can give you initial and early feedback about the content that you plan to make available on your extranet or intranet.  That can also help you determine how to properly document the governance process.

Make sure that as a part of your planning process and governance documentation that you’ve identified the correct people within your organization to own content and keep it up-to-date.  It may also be useful to plan how you will identify unused content and weed it from the system.

#3 Poor usability

It cannot be stressed enough: poor usability will absolutely kill an extranet or intranet.  Poor usability can arise from a number of problems: missing or inaccurate search, confusing navigation, poorly placed links to important information, or confusing methods of getting content updated.

As with insuring that you have the correct content, making sure to bring on a group of your target audience early on in the process will help get early feedback that could allow you to make corrections where needed.

Don’t be afraid to invest time early on in prototyping your site with any kind of visual prototyping tool.  And don’t forget that in a pinch, pen and paper prototypes can still lead to a good deal of feedback from your users.

#4 Incomplete or poorly documented use cases

Whether you’re building a commercial web application or an extranet or intranet, not documenting the types of things that you expect your users to do will certainly lead to problems.

Before venturing out on your next project, make sure that a part of the project documentation includes use cases.  As with #2, having this documentation ahead of time will make documenting the governance for your extranet or intranet much easier.

To build a good use case, start with a good user persona, or a composite of the type of user you expect to browse your site.  List out the common tasks you expect this perosona to complete, such as: searching for a Knowledge Base article, adding a new service request, downloading a whitepaper, or collaborating with team members.  Describe in detail how you expect them to complete these tasks.  This also forces you to think more about your information architecture, as described in #5.

#5 Poorly planned information architecture

Information architecture — how you arrange your navigation, your document taxonomy, your application screen flows — is commonly overlooked when building a new extranet or intranet.  This is an area where a little investment in time can pay off big in the end.

Often times, when information architecture is overlooked or ignored during a project, you may end up with a site that gets a few hits directly to important content, but the rest of the site remains untouched.  This is usually caused by a poor organization of the information available in the site.

Having your extranet or intranet have consistent and understandable terminology, intuitive navigation, and a proper taxonomy for your documents will increase your site’s usability, and allow more users to feel comfortable browsing your site.

Planning out your site’s information architecture is very similar to building a corporate taxonomy, which is explored in more detail in the post Building a Corporate Taxonomy.

Filed under: CMS, Enterprise Web, Knowledge Management