For employees at many organizations, using the corporate intranet is a necessary evil. Poorly designed tools and resources are frustrating — especially when they’re mandatory.
When people have a choice, they avoid frustrating technology by seeking out better alternatives and workarounds. When there isn’t an alternative, as is often the case with corporate intranet tools, poor usability has a far-reaching negative impact on employee efficiency, satisfaction and performance.
Poor usability causes people to experience two different kinds of frustration:
- Cognitive load: This frustration occurs when people are forced to remember many different things as they do their work. This burden on the memory increases the sense of stress and discomfort when they’re working and it causes them to make more mistakes.
- Cognitive friction: This occurs when a user experiences frustration while trying to accomplish a task. The relationship between a design object (such as a dropdown menu or a “cancel” button) and the possible action it produces is sometimes called an “affordance.” When a design fails to accurately convey possible actions available to users, these misused affordances lead to cognitive friction.
For example, if your intranet makes users validate every step they take by selecting “OK” or “cancel,” these unnecessary obstacles cause cognitive friction and slow people down. The confirmation dialogues are not the anticipated result to their action, thus it frustrates users’ progress. An “undo” function would be more appropriate in many cases. But the platform does need to ask users for confirmation when they’re making a decision that’s critical, or you’ll likely end up with frustration from unnecessary errors.
With the proliferation of mobile devices and apps, people have grown accustomed to applications with streamlined, well-designed user interfaces that slim down the features and focus on key tasks. As a result, people know what it feels like to work with a stripped-down, functional user interface (UI). When they come to work and have to click through all kinds of unnecessary screens and steps to complete a task, it’s highly frustrating, because they know the user experience could be much better.
When a poor UI is forcing people work at a slower pace, the impact is measurable in terms of lost productivity. The inefficient system costs time and money, and employees have to rely more heavily on your IT and technical support. Cutting corners on intranet design and usability testing may save a little money up front, but you’ll end up paying for it later with all of the calls and questions your support staff has to handle.
An inefficient UI also has consequences for employee performance that are more difficult to measure. Many different factors feed into overall job satisfaction, but it’s not an area where people are able to compartmentalize. If they have to spend a lot of time using a cumbersome tool, it contributes to a general dissatisfaction or unhappiness.
In the case of a corporate intranet, a poor user experience also reflects on the organization, and employees may unconsciously project some of their frustration with poor intranet design onto the company itself. If your company values its casual, easy-going environment, but the intranet constantly forces users to jump through hoops to accomplish simple tasks, it creates a dissonance that tends to undermine the corporate culture.
Conversely, when an organization puts time and money into building a good, usable tool that reflects the company’s culture and values, it leads to positive associations for employees. A great corporate intranet may not mean the difference between loyal and disloyal employees. But a lot of seemingly small things do add up in helping to make a person’s job both meaningful and enjoyable.
Learn more about how user experience contributes to productivity by contacting Portal Solutions.
Contributor: Adam Krueger, Creative Director at Portal Solutions
