Enterprise 2.0 Evaluation – Before and After
From Jakob Nielsen
- Define a number of core employee tasks.
- Find out how frequently people perform these tasks.
- Find the loaded hourly cost of an average employee in your company. (Or, for a more advanced approach, segment employees by major job categories and run this analysis for each segment, using average costs for people in that segment, as well as their frequency of use.)
- Observe and time people as they perform the defined tasks with your current design. For timing, a simple stopwatch will suffice; you don’t need special equipment or a fancy usability lab. Indeed, we often collect benchmark metrics for clients by testing in a small conference room.
- Multiply the following numbers: time on task, each task’s frequency, the employees’ hourly rate, and the number of intranet users. The result is how much it costs the company to have employees accomplish the tasks using the current design.
- Adjust this cost estimate to account for the tasks you didn’t measure. For example, if you measured 1/3 of the core tasks employees do, you should multiply your measured numbers by 3 to get a decent estimate for all tasks. This, of course, assumes that you didn’t focus the testing on the intranet’s best-supported or best-designed areas, but rather on a representative and fairly chosen sample of tasks.
