I read with interest James Robertson’s post 25 reasons why saving time on your intranet is a bad metric in which he examines the common practice of measuring time per task to assess the usability and effectiveness of an intranet, and the increasingly disturbing practice of calculating a return on investment based on potential time savings.

The problem is that these metrics are fatally flawed, in almost every respect. They are a bad basis for intranet teams to justify their existence or demonstrate their value, and are dangerous in ways that aren’t properly recognised. So as a service to intranet teams, I’d like see if I can demolish this once and for all.

Measuring the time it takes staff to perform tasks on their intranet has become almost ubiquitous, but I can say from personal experience that it’s usually a waste of time. From my point of view, the main problem is tasks that are completely unrealistic, but the full list of problems that James lists is excellent and painfully true (like watching an episode of “The Office” if you have ever spent any time working on intranets).

Task-based usability testing of an intranet (or a website) has it’s place, but it’s not the primary method we should be using. And certainly when presenting the results we need to be very careful, I would only include them as part of a holistic appraisal of the site and even then only refer to the trends that might require further investigation based on the time per task results. I wouldn’t tell stakeholders they’ve just saved millions by tweaking their intranet.

[By the way, the articles James quotes are from Jakob Nielsen's Useit.com not our Usit.com.au]