You might be thinking, my company’s intranet has a staff directory that is up to date with telephone numbers so it is enough. Right? Well you are wrong!

What if I told that you could get more value out of your staff directory? It is common knowledge that there is even more value in information from drawing relationships after all.  

So here’s the scenario. You navigate your way to the staff directory, get a list of colleagues and click on the person you are looking for. Next you get their contact details and maybe birthday and the department they work in.

What if next to that information, you could see a list of documents they have recently published / contributed? How about the list of projects they are active in?

At this point it is important to note that there are 2 types of information.

1)    Immediate information
Contact details, department the person works for, etc. Things like the department they work in should have a link that takes you to that department’s profile page.

2)    Additional Information (contextually relevant)
There is tons of information (relating to an employee) that can be exposed within this context. To list a few:
•    Published reports / articles / documents
•    Bookmarks (links to websites of interest)
•    Latest comments (comments on company blogs, policies, etc)
•    Status updates (the employee’s status updates –micro-blog)
 

Design / Information Architecture considerations.
Taking into consideration the fact that we are viewing an employee’s directory listing prominence should be given to the employee’s contact information here since the context is directory. So the main part of the page is reserved to that.

The additional information could be shown on the sidebars or as they say, below the fold. These can be displayed as a list with an excerpt and a link to read more

If you think about it, the information you require may very well be presented to you in this way. This means you didn’t have to interrupt your colleague with a telephone call asking for a copy of the latest report.

In this instance what you may not realise is that by not breaking that colleague’s “flow” you saved them 10 minutes (of getting their flow back after the distraction) and in turn saved the company money.

The main thing to keep in mind is that there is always a bigger problem we are solving with intranets, and it’s that of information / knowledge management and sharing.

And on that note, it’s a wrap!