Welcome to MyRagan Forum. Browse through any forum, sign in or register here and you'll be on your way to creating your own discussions and posting replies for the whole community to see :D
Just wondering if any of you have existing guidelines you use to determine whether something deserves to be a "quick link" on your intranet site. Ideally, we'd have a variety of things that employees could select from for their own quick links, but our current site doesn't allow for that.
And we're getting many requests from departments to set up this or that as quick links. To avoid saying yes or no to all, I'd like to be able to point to our guidelines that spell out in what cases something would qualify as a quicklink. I'm thinking that some of the determination should include the amount of traffic to that particular page/feature/application. But what else? Thanks!
We have a place on our intranet homepage for "Popular Pages." The catch is, we check our Web stats to see if these are popular. So that helps us in not cluttering the area too much. We have made exceptions for new items (access to time reporting or news about H1N1).
But we've also created a consistent spot on all of the department pages so that they can create their own quick links to their heart's content.
Quicklinks can quickly become a dumping ground that the organization uses to solve these two problems.
a) This link / page has nowhere else to live in the navigation structure (and it always does ... or should in a properly structured site)
b) The org wants people to notice this page - Quicklinks is seen as prime real estate.
I'm redesigning a site right now that will use a 'Related Pages' concept. Each link in there is pre-determined. It truly allows us to 'web' the content together - in a manner that has some logic to it.
My advice and explanations to my colleagues is to solve users problems first, then organization / business process problems. I try to educate that a list of unrelated links - without apparent logic to the user - will confuse and defeat the intended purpose of the Quicklink.
Quicklinks put you one step forward than two steps back unless they are predetermined and/or solve a genuine user problem.
Quicklinks can quickly become a dumping ground that the organization uses to solve these two problems.
a) This link / page has nowhere else to live in the navigation structure (and it always does ... or should in a properly structured site.)
b) The org wants people to notice this page - Quicklinks is seen as prime real estate.
I'm redesigning a site right now that will use a 'Related Pages' concept. Each link in there is pre-determined. It truly allows us to 'web' the content together - in a manner that has some logic to it.
My advice and explanations to my colleagues is to solve users problems first, then organization / business process problems. I try to educate that a list of unrelated links - without apparent logic to the user - will confuse and defeat the intended purpose of the Quicklink.
Quicklinks put you one step forward than two steps back unless they are predetermined and/or solve a genuine user problem.
