IBF Intranets live - Part 4 intranet doctor

William Hudson of IBF shows intranet patients from Corus and BT

Talking to Chris from Corus
Working with consultants to turn portal into an intranet

news / tasks / favorites

Corus keen to get some expert advice from the Doctor

William - double level navigation
Problem with this type of navigation e.g. www.smart.com
Mouse movement from one big to small nav means that second tab is accidentally moused over and that changes the menu items in the second level
Problem is that people move mouse in straight line which causes the problem.

All done with javascript - this causes problems with speach recogntion packages e.g. Dragon
This means that Dragon doesn't work - so accessibility isn't good.
Architecture needs to take this into account assistive technologies.

Patient 2 - BT

Problem - too much colour and too many banner ads

BT Intranet manager - worried that banner blindness is an issue

Paper by Benway + Lane (10yrs old now) but a real issue

e.g. on BT page 'Yipee' and 'Simply' are just going to be ignored by most users.
People photos aren't quite the same as people want to look at people

There are so many groupings of information, this makes it very hard.
Some can be dismissed because they are very focused but others span may information types and these make things hard for users.
5 to 7 groups of navigation is better.

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