Does Scent Apply The Same to Intranets? Yes. And No.

Whenever we start talking about the scent of information (which we do a lot— have you noticed?), a question we always hear is, “Does this apply to intranets the same way?” The answer? Yes. And No.

Scent applies to intranets in that it’s a necessary component of how users (in this case, the organization’s employees) seek content in large information spaces, and there are few information spaces larger than today’s corporate intranets. So, everything we know about scent applies nicely to the structure of the intranet.

However, it’s not quite the same way that scent applies to Internet web sites. That’s because intranets have a page type rarely found on the Internet: the portal page. Portal pages, which launch the employee off to various internal sites on the intranet, are a different beast from home pages, store page, department pages, and the other types of pages we typically find on a web site. So, designing scent for these pages has its own special challenges.

In this issue’s UIEtips, I described some of what we’ve found when we apply scent to some intranet portals we’ve worked on recently. While the portal presents special challenges, understanding the basic attributes of scent can dramatically reduce the effort it takes for designers to create a wildly successful page.

Have you been involved in an intranet portal design? If so, what did you do to ensure you provided good scent? We’d love to hear from you. Post a comment below.

[If you want to know more about scent and techniques for making both intranets and internet web sites more usable, you’ll probably want to come to our upcoming six-city UIE RoadShow: Web Design Foundations. Christine Perfetti and I will dive deep in the notion of scent, with a ton of examples and techniques for ensuring you create the most satisfying designs possible. More information available on the roadshow site.]