Results: Usability Review

OK, now I've desribed the steps I planned to take, what actually happened?

The first thing I did was the Usability Review

I followed all the links in the site and documented the outcome. I found, amongst other things:

• Multiple broken links including the link to the Intranet home page being broken on all pages.
• No unified style guide – each department’s area was different in layout, fonts and colours (they had been designed and built by different people independently).
• No policy governed opening new browser windows so this happened randomly and without warning.
• As there was no style guide a number of dept areas had used a default serif font of Times New Roman.
• Blinking text and scrolling banners were used on some pages.
• Colour choices made text difficult to read (e.g. bright pink text on a gradient pale-blue to white background).
• A certain section's page layout was so bad if you didn’t re-size the browser window part of the navigation was obscured by the logo.
• On most pages the company logo linked to the company website on the internet except where it was broken and one in dept area where linked it to the guidelines on reproducing the company logo (a PDF). These guidelines were not available from anywhere else.
• Content was massively out of date.
• Content was duplicated.
• Content was found in unexpected areas.
• It was sometimes impossible to increase text size.
• There were no hover states on some links.
• We could not see any way to find something if you didn’t already know where it was.
• There was no logic to the arrangement of the content.

The above situation developed because there was no central control over the look and feel or the development of the Intranet.

There was no control over the publishing and each department had complete freedom to design, build and publish.

Then a publishing freeze was called to start re-developing the Intranet and then other business took priority, this caused the out of date content.