Portal Usability: The old rules still apply
The fundamentals of Portal usability seem to have gone unchanged in recent years, according to Jakob Nielson of the Nielson Norman Group. Back in 2002 NNg did an Intranet Portal usability study to pinpoint best practices and lessons learned in portal design. The report, which I HIGHLY recommend purchasing if you have anything to do with portal design, highlighted the best and worst of portal design and did an excellent job quantifying the effect of bad designs. Here is what Jakob says about the new findings, or lack of.
1. It seems that many boxed portal solutions still do not offer great usability out of the box.
2. Single sign on is still a dream for most companies. I will interject here and say that I do not totally agree with this statement. Many boxed portal solutions have Identity Management features built in and although it is not a true single-sign-on, being able to provide users with a “password vault” that the portal has access to is probably just as good, if not better in some scenarios.
3. Personalization on the individual level is still rare, but personalization based upon users job role is becoming more common.
4. Steering Committees are still the predominant method of portal control.
5. Companies still do not truly understand where the return on investment from a portal derives from.
Some new findings that JN points out:
1. Many products offer there own “portals”. The very idea of a Portal is that it is a SINGLE point of entry, so these other “portal” solutions should be integrated programmatically, and made to look like an integrated member of the greater portal.
2. Stale content is stil a bane upon portals, but the increase of user-created, and maintained content is gaining in popularity.
3. When it comes to user-created content, do not assume that users will understand the greater complexities of your information architecture.
4. User Acceptance is a much greater predictor of success than previously thought.
5. Less is more when it comes to your information architecture. This is the old “wide vs deep” taxonomy argument, but it still comes down to finding a happy balance.
6. Portals are going beyond being information aggregators, to being application organizers.
Read the entire article here >> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/portals.html