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Examples From Our Intranet & Extranet Portfolio

by Yannis |May 18th, 2012

Most organisations we have recently worked with are grappling with the same challenge: having lost faith in the company’s monolithic intranet or extranet, employees have been creating and maintaining small, unauthorised communities on external social channels, mainly Facebook, LinkedIn Groups or Twitter. Organisations tend to respond in one of three ways: some throw up a fight, caution the perpetrators and even ban all social media use across the organisation; others turn a blind eye only to see such illicit activity gathering pace; and finally, the few left see this as an opportunity for transformation and embrace change putting their intranet or extranet at its core.

We have found that when it comes to intranets and extranets an important factor that determines a company’s strategy is the questions asked during the planning phase: if, for example,  the main question is “what do we want in our intranet” companies find themselves discussing platforms, technologies, modules, webparts or departmental requests; on the other hand, companies brave enough to ask themselves “what kind of company do we want to be” discover that their intranet is only a means to an end and not an end in itself.

Before designing and building an intranet or extranet, our job (or even duty) as a experienced supplier it to use our analytical process to help the organisation fist ask the right questions and then find the right answers.

Below is a list of intranets and extranets we have created belonging to a number of diverse organisations that have chosen equally diverse paths for creating them:

 

Global extranet for London Business School

 

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5 uses of corporate video to blow the socks off your audience

by Yannis |May 6th, 2012

We have just put our video portfolio on Vimeo which gives me a great opportunity to visit the topic of the use of video in corporate communications. It’s not an accident that, without exception, every company we come across recognises the value of video and wishes that video was more extensively used in both their internal and external communications. It’s easy to see why. Switched-on professionals wrestle daily with an information tsunami that comes from countless sources and in nano-sized chunks. Video on the other hand offers a few moments of sitting back and enjoying the ride; a piece of well-crafted video communication delivers dense content in an engaging way that requires minimum effort to consume it and delivers maximum impact.

Below we list the five most typical uses of video in corporate communications and illustrate each with an example from our portfolio.

 

Bring to life sales presentations

A pacey 60 second opening will ensure that you grab your audience’s attention from the very beginning and that your key message remains etched in their brains long after you exit the room.

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10+2 Mobile Investor Relations apps to help you plan yours

by Yannis |April 29th, 2012

For most corporations, a mobile app catering for the investors’ voracious appetite for information is still considered a luxury. However, such an app makes perfect sense as not only does it make information available 24/7, but also it plants your brand in the hands of your target audience. Below we are exploring 10 such apps as well as 2 additional corporate apps that are not aimed at investors but still worth looking at for their exceptional user experience.

 

Unilever

This is one of the best looking apps. It is fast, simple, slick and rich in content. It makes great use of video and keeps PDFs to a minimum.

 

 

TVlogic

This app, probably created for the South Korean market, is rich in content, formats, as well as attitude. Although not the best looking app out there, it uses strong graphics that make browsing a more tactile experience.

 

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10 Interactive Timelines to Inspire Your Content Marketing

by Yannis |April 16th, 2012

Bring your content marketing to life with an interactive timeline. We did some research on the topic for a client and below are our best findings.

 

British History Timeline

Visually interesting timeline created by the BBC and featuring zoom-in functionality and filters. It suffers a bit from the vertical text and the fact that there is no actual information provided until we zoom in.

 

The path of protest

Unusual pseudo-3D timeline created by the Guardian with information spread across the x and z axes. It looks good but it lacks any user controls other than navigating back and forth in time. Also, each link clicks through to a new page making this timeline more of a fancy index page rather than a contained experience.

 

Global Events Timeline

Visual extravagance created by the British Library. It features filters, favourites, screen shots and a carousel-like navigation mechanism. The layout feels a bit cluttered and the information included is a bit of a let down; it leaves you wishing it was as elaborate as the navigation.

 

Steve Jobs Timeline

A very simple timeline created by The New York Times. It would work a lot better if the markers on the timeline were easier to click on.

 

9/11 Memorial

Another pseudo-3D timeline featuring a long horizontal scroll. It has a nice feel to it, but it could benefit from a non-linear mechanism that allows users to jump to any point of the timeline without having to rely on the scroll-bar or wait for the animation to get them there.

 

History of Adobe

A busy timeline marking events with dots, like the BBC’s timeline above. And like the BBC above, the issue is that the main “dotted” view does not provide any actual information and therefore offers zero value to the user. A close-up view like in the 9/11 timeline would ensure instant user engagement.

 

200 Years of the New England Journal of Medicine

A very complex timeline featuring a number of navigation tools and filters spread across multiple axes. Parts of it look good, but overall the UX has a whiff of interactive CDs from the late 90s. It could benefit from full screen viewing, more legible text and simplified navigation.

 

U.S. Political Climate

Visually arresting interactive infographic combining a timeline with multiple layers of information. The upside-down text is a bit of a UX nightmare and the physical split between the timeline and the info wheel requires the user to go back and forth between the two to make any sense of it, but it looks simple and it almost convinces that it actually is.

 

British Prime Ministers

Created by No 10, this is the first non-Flash timeline we came across. It works really well, but is let down by the big image in the background that offers little value and makes the whole experience visually busy and tiring.

 

Target through the years

A simple timeline that features a neat filter and a series of flying panels holding the information. It works well, but the panel animation is a bit annoying after a while.

 

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5 reasons why your next corporate website should feature illustration and 5 reasons why it might not

by Yannis |February 8th, 2012

So you are creating your new corporate website.

Your web agency is beavering away on the designs, you have instructed various departments to submit their content, you have hired a copywriter to polish the copy, you are about to sign the new hosting contracts, the CMS training is in the calendar and you have even started planning for mobile optimisation. Life feels pretty good, until you get to the part where you have to source images to fill those large, grey placeholders in the wireframes.

If you are fortunate, your organisation produces über-sexy products like medical equipment, Audi car parts, or bicycles whose magnificent design is already captured and sitting in the corporate image library. But, if you are like a large number of corporations then your offering is either intangible, like services or software, or not handsome enough to front your marketing and sales. Your web agency probably suggested a conceptual photo shoot, but in the end that felt like one production headache too many. So you fall back to the safe cradle of stock photography and you wheel in the attractive people on their laptops and mobiles, the business gatherings in elegant surroundings and the smiley, racially balanced operators. And since most of your competitors, suppliers, partners and customers do the same, you sink your brand to the bottomless depths of obscurity.

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New Beta BBC homepage vs FT web app

by Yannis |September 21st, 2011

If the new BBC homepage is from tabloid Mars, then the FT web app is from broadsheet Venus. It’s a bit unfair comparing the just released BBC homepage with the fully launched and comprehensive FT web app. Nevertheless, it’s worth doing a quick comparison for two reasons: first because both brands are giants of the publishing industry and second because the world of tablets and smartphones is in such a flux that any innovation which might point to a new UX convention ought to get everyone to sit up and take notice.

The new Beta BBC homepage

The FT web app

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Facebook’s future: is the writing on the wall?

by Yannis |June 15th, 2011

IBM just celebrated its 100th birthday, so the question going around is which of the current tech super-brands will still be standing proud in 100 years from now. The obvious contenders to send the mind travelling into the distant future are Google, Apple, Microsoft and of course Facebook.

Yet, in the past couple of days I have come across alarming signs of a Facebook-less near future. First, I read a story on the CIO website that Facebook lost 6 million users in the US, then today, a comment by Richard Godwin appeared in the Evening Standard, arguing that Facebook’s good fortunes are turning. To top it all, today I also had business meetings with 7 people from the corporate sector, six of which don’t even use Facebook! What’s going on?

Could it be the privacy issues? Maybe the aging of the Facebook brand influences user behaviour more than the utility Facebook provides. Or maybe, after years of soporific wall postings, people just want to move on with their real lives.

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Triggers that can get humanisation on the corporate agenda

by Yannis |May 17th, 2011

Most of the our new business in the past 3 months falls under the corporate/internal communications umbrella. The briefs that have come out of these wins have a common underlying requirement that is worth discussing as it follows a recent shift in how corporations communicate. The requirement is to humanise the organisation. In the grand scheme of things there is nothing notable here; consumer brands jumped on the humanisation bandwagon a few years back with blogs, Facebook and Twitter. However, in the corporate world humanisation is a topic that has just started to creep up in the marketing and internal comms wish lists.

In other aspects of life, accepting you have a problem is half way towards the solution, but that first step can be the hardest one to take. The need for humanisation is not one that comes naturally  to a corporation through a slow evolutionary process and for that reason what triggers such change makes an interesting topic.

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