Determining Link Order on Intranet Portals
In my recent article, Intranet Portals and Scent are Made for Each Other, I discussed the factors that make links on the portal page give off good scent:
Link order is also very important. Well-designed portals put the most important links at the very top and order the remaining links by priority and need. In our studies, poorly-designed portals often resort to alphabetical order, which confuses employees as they expect related links to be group together with the most critical functions near the top.
Several folks have asked what techniques we’ve used to determine the ideal order of links.
We’ve had good success on intranets with a rating system. Using the use cases/tasks associated with each link, we ask users to rate them on two scales:
- Is this an activity that is important to your work?
- Is this an activity that you do frequently?
(There are things that are frequent, but not very important, such as checking the lunch menu. There are things that are critically important when needed, but needed only once per year.)
We’ve done this with both binary scales (Circle the “F” or “I” if the use case/task is Frequent or Important) and Likert scales (1 is very infrequent/very unimportant, 5 is very frequent/very important) and not seen any real difference.
Your link order becomes a descending list of the combined scores.