It’s more and more common these days for intranet design to be outsourced as part of your intranet redesign or continual development. This is supported by the latest Nielsen Norman report. We all recognise the visual importance of a great intranet design, but writing an intranet creative brief can be challenging if you have not written a creative brief before.
Before you start to let your creativity flow, I just wanted to take a moment to highlight the importance of including your goals, timescales and budgets within your creative briefing document. They will help determine the scope of your project and including these in your creative brief will give your intranet designer a solid framework to work within.
Once your intranet designer has a good understanding of your goals, timescales and budget they can create a design that realistically meets your needs. Photographers, illustrators, and other resources such as media, fonts and stock images will all have cost and time implications, so they will need to be aware of what your budget and timescales can accommodate.
The answers to the following should be included in your creative brief:
Intranet Goals:
During the planning stage of your intranet, you will have set out some SMART goals for your intranet (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timebound). These goals will include the aims and objectives of your intranet. It is important to include this information within your brief so that your intranet designer understands what you are trying to achieve from your intranet.
You will need to mention whether your intranet is:
- Mainly used to help employees complete tasks
- Mainly used to communicate to employees
- A combination of both
If you have a task based intranet your focus will be on processes such as accessing documents. If your intranet is communications driven then the focus will be on news articles and company information. Alternatively, the business priorities may be to provide a combination of both news and processes.
Intranet Timescales
- Realistic – When does the project need to be completed by?
- Timely – Do you have any specific deadlines? How will overruns affect your overall intranet project?
If you need the intranet to coincide with any other marketing, make sure that your designer is aware of this.
Intranet Budget
- Specific – what is your budget?
- Measurable – how much is your budget?
- Achievable – is it realistic? Do you have a contingency plan?
It’s always a good idea to keep your project sponsor informed of any budget and cost implications. Also, remember to make allowances for any additional editing costs.
Including information on your goals, design budget and timescales within your creative brief will give your intranet designer a good idea of the type of design they can realistically achieve.
In a future blog I will look at the importance of including a company profile, information on your target audience and how you will speak to them within your brief. Writing a comprehensive design brief will save time for everyone involved and money as your designer will not waste time creating designs that don’t match your requirements.
I hope you have found this blog useful. To inspire you further I would like to invite you to come along to one of our free intranet events.
