INTRANET

Your intranet and your public website on the open Internet are two different information spaces and  should have two different user interface designs  . It is tempting to try to save design resources by reusing a single design, but it is a bad idea to do so because the two types of site differ along several dimensions:

•  Users  differ. Intranet users are your own employees who know a lot about the company, its organizational structure, and special terminology and circumstances. Your Internet site is used by customers who will know much less about your company and also care less about it.

• The  tasks  differ. The intranet is used for everyday work inside the company, including some quite complex applications; the Internet site is mainly used to find out information about your products.

• The  type of information  differs. The intranet will have many draft reports, project progress reports, human resource information, and other detailed information, whereas the Internet site will have marketing information and customer support information.

• The  amount of information  differs. Typically, an intranet has between ten and a hundred times as many pages as the same company's public website. The difference is due to the extensive amount of work-in-progress that is documented on the intranet and the fact that many projects and departments never publish anything publicly even though they have many internal documents.

•  Bandwidth and cross-platform needs  differ. Intranets often run between a hundred and a thousand times faster than most Internet users' Web access which is  stuck at low-band or mid-band  , so it is feasible to use rich graphics and even multimedia and other advanced content on intranet pages. Also, it is sometimes possible to control what computers and software versions are supported on an intranet, meaning that designs need to be less  cross-platform compatible   (again allowing for more advanced page content).

Most basically, your intranet and your website are two different information spaces. They should  look different  in order to let employees know when they are on the internal net and when they have ventured out to the public site. Different looks will emphasize the sense of place and thus facilitate navigation. Also, making the two information spaces feel different will facilitate an understanding of when an employee is seeing information that can be freely shared with the outside and when the information is internal and confidential.

An intranet design should be much more task-oriented and less promotional than an Internet design. A company should only have a single intranet design, so users only have to learn it once. Therefore it is acceptable to use a much larger number of options and features on an intranet since users will not feel intimidated and overwhelmed as they would on the open Internet where people move rapidly between sites. (I know of a frighteningly large number of companies with  multiple intranet homepages  and multiple intranet styles: Step 1 is to get rid of that in favour of a  unified intranet  .)

An intranet will need a much stronger navigational system than an Internet site because it has to encompass a larger amount of information. In particular, the intranet will need a navigation system to facilitate movement between servers, whereas a public website only needs to support within-site navigation.

        By KINGALU AVIN

               BAPRM 42697