Suggested-Employee Search—The Best Intranet Design Today—Could Save Your Organization Half a Million Dollars

Employee Search Is the Most Important Intranet Feature Today

Few intranet features are as impressive as search suggestions—in particular, suggestions for employee search. Since finding employees is the most common task done on intranets, any UI elements that expedite and improve this task are notable.

Employee search builds on the long-established basic design pattern for web search, but because of its special characteristics, some deviations from the standard website usability guidelines are in order.

People-Search Suggestions: Traits of a Good Pattern

The most successful front end for people-search suggestions contains some combination of the following elements:

• The search box appears as one open field, with no scoping options before or after it.

• As the user types, suggestions immediately appear.
• Speedy response time, preferably on the order of 0.1 seconds, is imperative. (To ensure fast display of the suggesitons, it may be necessary for mobile intranets to remove the employee photos when accessed over slow connections.)

The list of search suggestions displays the following elements:

• Picture of the employee — this helps disambiguate between multiple people with the same name and also makes the user experience more human
• Name, which appears as a link to his full person document
• Email address, which appears as a link that opens and automatically addresses an email message
• Phone number, ideally as a click-to-call link
• Links for items such as messaging and the employee’s blog (if such links can be displayed legibly and if they are important at the organization)

In addition to people information, search suggestions typically include other types of content (such as pages, applications, documents, and forms) related to the search query.

To differentiate the types of content in the suggestion list, follow these guidelines:

• Organize items by type of suggestion; group all like items together in the same category.
• Include a heading for each section.
• Delineate sections using lines, spacing, or background color (but ensure there is still high contrast between the text and any backgrounds used).
• Display images and icons for each type of content (such as the Adobe Acrobat logo for PDF documents).
• Present a link to see all results, for example: See all ‘20’ ‘documents’ containing ‘Wa’.

History of Employee-Search Behavior and Associated Costs

Reviewing the history of intranet employee search might help you understand why I am so amped up about the design pattern for employee-search suggestions.

Year 2001: Bad Design Wastes $750,000 USD at a 10,000-Person Organization

It is the year 2001. Most intranets are ahead of the game if they offer an accurate PDF file that includes the name of every employee, her job title, phone extension, and email address. The time-consuming, error-prone path that employees take to find particular colleagues often goes something like this:

1. Navigate or search for the “Employee Directory” PDF file.
2. Hope that the PDF you find—which you may have already saved locally on your desktop to avoid the pain of having to find it again on the intranet—is updated and accurate. (It is common to have multiple intranet sites with out-of-date forms at organizations, so the online PDF that you happen to find is often inaccurate.)
3. Sometimes locate, download, and install a new version of Adobe Acrobat so you can read the PDF.
4. Open the PDF.
5. Scroll and scan for the person’s name, job title, or whatever information you actually know about the person that you are searching for. Labor with the tabular, multi-column layout in which many documents are formatted, with the alphabetical listing spanning more than one column and page.
6. Or use the “find” feature in Acrobat to get to the right person. This often involves a fair amount of trial and error, unless you know how to precisely spell the person’s full name.

In 2001, the act of finding an employee takes people, on average, 1 minute and 44 seconds. (We measured this back then. For more recent data see our report Intranet Usability Guidelines Series: Vol. 01: Intranet Research Overview and How to Run Your Own Studies.) At a 10,000-person company, if everyone does this task once a week, the organization uses more than 15,000 hours per year on just finding employee contact information. This amount of time translates to more than $750,000 USD per year, if the hourly cost per employee is $50 USD.

CTOs and any operations people should be dizzy with this knowledge. But back in 2001, most CTOs aren’t aware of this, as the intranet is their lowest priority. Even the developers working on the intranet consider it to be some unwanted rash to be reckoned with, or on a good day, their personal art project.

Year 2005: Employee Search Improves Some

Fast forward to 2005. Employee-search features and backend support become more of a priority. Managers realize that there is too much information in silos all around the organization and at least acknowledge that they need to address the problem of multiple backend systems accounting for employee information. As for the employee-search user interface (UI), many intranets now offer an open type-in field for employee search, as well as a field for intranet-wide search, on all pages of the intranet. There are many variations of this search capability, such as multiple fields, one field with radio buttons, or a drop-down list to first scope the search. Some UIs beckon users to do the work after the query is made, sifting through various result types on the search-engine results page (SERP).

Any of these designs vastly improve the usability and speed of finding people. But, still error-prone in many ways, the search process often goes something like this:

1. Locate the employee search field.
2. Sometimes mistake this field with the field for intranet-wide search and get a SERP of confusing results.
3. Diagnose the issue (usually relatively quickly), and conduct the search again, this time in the employee-search field.
4. Scan the SERP for the person you want.
5. On good intranets, find the basic information that you need displayed on the SERP. On less good intranets, open the result to see the information in the person document.

In 2005, finding an employee takes people, on average, 1 minute and 6 seconds. (Yes, we measured this again in an effort to update our intranet-related usability data.) An improvement over 2001 numbers, but at a 10,000-person company, if everyone does this task once a week, the organization still spends about 9,500 hours per year just on finding people. This equates to $475,000 USD per year. Almost half a million dollars is money better spent on a search appliance, UX research, IA design, a content strategist, and a bonus for the good people on the intranet team.

2006 to 2011: Little Employee-Search Innovation

From 2006 to 2011 the front-end search UI remains roughly the same. We do, however, see employee-search improvements on intranets, but most of these relate to the SERP and to the person documents, which now include more detailed information such as the employee’s affinities, hours, skills, projects, languages that she writes and speaks, and so on. There are great benefits to be had from better-designed employee profile pages. With these, return on investment comes less form minimizing interaction cost and more from enabling the employee to know more about other employees, and therefore more accurately select the person to contact about any given topic.

2012 to Present: Huge Improvements

But in 2011 things began to change. As I reviewed that year’s set of entries for the Intranet Design Annual, I came across MAN Diesel & Turbo SE, who took fly-out windows to a new level by displaying information about people as users typed their query in the people-search box. In that same set of submissions, Everything Everywhere and NCR Corporation intranets did something similar with pop-ups: When users moused over a name, the person’s team, a photo, and other information appeared. All 3 organizations later became winners of our 2012 Intranet Design Annual contest. Something thrilling was happening with people search: it was much more immediate.

Not until 2012, when I reviewed the entries for the Intranet Design Annual 2013, did I see the preeminent innovation around employee search: a clever people-suggestion box. The people suggestions in this box show the employees’ pictures and also display the most frequently needed employee information (with some of this information even being clickable). And a second big innovation was the unification of the intranet-wide search and the employee search. Acorda Therapeutics, Inc. was one of the first organizations to exemplify this pattern well.

Acorda Therapeutics, Inc. Suggested-Search Example

The Acorda Therapeutics, Inc. design has a single search box. Because looking up colleagues is the primary use of search at Acorda Therapeutics, Inc., results for people are in the first set listed in the search suggestions. Beyond employees, the top 3 results for each facet are also displayed. These results are grouped by type (People, Websites, Documents, How To’s and Apps), and a thick gray bar helps emphasize the different types of suggestions. A link to see more indicates the number of matching results, and signals that there are more results available. Users can click directly on a result or click to view the full lists of results. 

The screenshot images above display: 1) a page with the suggested-employee search list open, and 2) a zoomed-in suggested-employee list. The content in these screenshots has been edited and blurred for anonymity.

Search Suggestions Can Save Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars

Given this pattern, here is how the user behavior goes:

1. Look to the open search field on any page.
2. Type a letter or a few letters.
3. As you type, scan the list of suggestions below for the person you want.
4. Once you found her, scan to her exact information that you want (let’s say for her email address).
5. Click the email link and immediately begin writing your message.

The whole process takes about 2 seconds. At a 10,000-person company, if everyone does this task once a week, the organization spends fewer than 300 hours and about $14,500 USD per year on searching for employees.

A good search-suggestions feature could save organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars every single year. Salaries could be put toward working on important tasks rather than toward dealing with unusable interfaces for people search.

Summary

Runners up for my favorite intranet features today are:

1. intricate personalization
2. efficient responsively designed intranets.

But employee-search suggestions is by far the best UI pattern to adopt on intranets in order to improve efficiency and communication between colleagues. This perky feature gets employees the right answer immediately so they can move on and do their work.

Read a related report: Intranet Usability Guidelines Series, Vol. 06: Searching the Intranet and the Employee Directory.