Building a Better KNET
In its efforts to build and maintain a unified intranet site for the Harvard Kennedy School community, the KNET team has persevered in the face of challenges that have sunk many similar projects. The number and diversity of stakeholders — from degree programs to research centers to administrative offices — often introduce tradeoffs between greater standardization and sought-after functionality. Resources and attention from decision-makers are tough to corral, especially in comparison to public-facing counterpart sites. Technical challenges include not only the semi-antiquated on-prem SharePoint instance it runs on, but also the myriad systems it must interface with.
Yet while KNET succeeds in housing a library of HKS information accessible from a single landing page, it is undercut by a much more fundamental issue: an insufficient focus on the realities and needs of its users. Given your role as Assistant Dean for Student Services and Programs, let’s narrow our focus to just include student users (though the same principles will likely apply elsewhere). Here are a couple ideas — which can be implemented together or separately — to help your team increase the value to HKS students by adapting the all-important landing page.
1) Create a pared-down landing page as an alternative display option for those who want to keep it simple.
If you asked a student about her complaint with KNET, it would probably be something like the following: “I need to do X, and I can’t figure out how to do it quickly.” During orientation, one of my leaders advised us that the only reason he ever went to KNET was to look up course reviews. Some users are like disconnected electrical circuits that just need to interact with the system for one purpose in order to illuminate their light bulbs.
The landing page in its current form does not make it easy for this type of user and adding a few features (and removing plenty) could go a long way for them. The search bar should feature prominently. A “Common Tasks” section with hyperlinks should also appear near the top of the page, selected based on actual click data and user interviews, not intuition. Other information and less common tasks should be organized how students engage with it, not by the entity who performs it (e.g., IT vs. Finance). Cut out the announcements, events, and HKS in the News. Students will save time and have fewer headaches requiring help from someone else. The page will likely also be more mobile-friendly, another common complaint from users.
2) Customize the landing page based on user profile for those who want “the full experience” — and if feasible, allow users to customize it themselves.
While there are some students who are purely transactional in their interactions with KNET, there are others who, consciously or sub-consciously, want it to be something more. They may feel funny saying it in the context of a school intranet site, but most students are really after something bigger than figuring out how to change their address: especially in a remote era, they want a sense of belonging to a unique community that they worked hard to become a part of. Given that the content of the landing page is managed by the Office of Communications and Public Affairs and puts a particular emphasis on highlighting the values of the community, HKS leadership likely subscribes to this ambition for KNET as well.
Instead of one-size-fits-all, is it possible that the KNET landing page — the main view, not the alternative simplified view proposed above — could be redesigned to make information more relevant to the user? Based on student attributes (e.g., Degree Program, Concentration), the content boxes could highlight and cut down on the number of clicks to access details kept today in deeper areas of the site. Instead of all announcements, users would only (or primarily) see notices that relate to them. Even better — though potentially a challenge with the current technology platform— what if the user could select the content boxes that they would like to see, such as Research Centers to subscribe to, or whether or not to view the “HKS in the News” module altogether?
The benefits of this change are harder to measure, but arguably more significant. More relevant information will likely increase engagement and student satisfaction. Even an updated user-interface will increase students’ perceptions of the university’s competence.
Final Note
One counter-argument to this approach of focusing on the student user is that it neglects the “content creator” user, captured by the following chicken-and-the-egg problem: do users not take advantage of the content on KNET because authors do not keep it up to date, or do authors not keep content up to date because they don’t think that users are going to KNET for it?
My hypothesis is that if you make it easy and desirable for student users to access the information they need, as well as the information they do not know they need, it will become a self-reinforcing process that will lead content creators to increase the quality (and currency) of information posted there. Additionally, I think that some users will want the simplified view, while others will want the “full experience.” It might be best to let them sort themselves by the landing page option they select.
Users do not always tell you exactly what they want because they usually do not actually know what they want. The only way to know for sure is to test it out and measure the results.
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