Personal Add-ons Section in the Portal
- Amit Starikovsky
- Sep 1, 2005
- 3 min read
Countless organizations invest significant efforts in developing work tools for their employees to increase productivity and meet their needs. Most don't operate in a vacuum, and before implementing solutions, they conduct preliminary needs mapping processes to try to adapt solutions to employees maximally.
The major challenge in these processes lies in finding a solution that addresses the maximum needs of the maximum number of users and causes each employee to "connect" with the solution and feel comfortable with it. After all, every person is different.
The importance of connecting users to the portal has been discussed extensively. This connection is very significant because the portal's success ultimately depends on how comfortable end users feel with it, how much they feel it's "theirs" and adapted to their needs, and therefore choose to use it.
Organizations want to turn the portal into the user's main workplace (desktop) and, therefore, want to "keep them" within the portal, providing everything they need so they don't go outside to graze in foreign fields. If they leave, they might not return... Therefore, much thought and resources are invested in making the portal more personal and better adapted to users and their needs.
One classic solution is the Personalize feature, which allows users to choose from allocated, non-mandatory panels what will be displayed and what won't, and sometimes also where and in what shades. However, today, we understand that this tool is more of a colorful gimmick than a practical benefit.
Most organizations incorporate external links as "useful sites/links" into the portal—information that cannot be directly integrated for various reasons but is important to users—whether functionally or personally. This thinking demonstrates the desire to look at the portal from the user's perspective. It is relatively easy to identify in the needs mapping process, but we encounter the obstacle: users are different, and what's "important" for one is "unnecessary" for another. No matter what we do, we'll always miss something and won't be able to customize it for every user.
Therefore, we propose a simple solution that doesn't require development and aims to address the need to allow maximum personal customization and make users feel at home. The only requirement is that users have continuous access to the external internet.
Instead of (or in addition to) incorporating an "important links/sites" section in the portal, we can include a section called "Personal Add-ons," where adding links to internal applications and external sites via hyperlink is enabled, like a mini-favorites list existing within the portal. Users will be given the option to add several links, as determined by portal administrators, and they can place important and functional sites there and name them as they wish.
This solution is particularly suitable for organizations where employees spend most of their time in the portal and where their main work is concentrated.
In this way, we allow them access outside the portal without going outside while also providing users a personal and homey feeling—just as someone renting a furnished apartment still wants to design their bedroom as they see fit.
To summarize, this solution doesn't include development or special software requirements, isn't complex or expensive, and allows employees to get the maximum benefit from their required stay in the portal while also providing a personal touch that can make all the difference.
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