There is a cost to not finding information. Although it's impossible
to measure the exact cost of employees not finding information on
a company's intranet, the tool below will give a ballpark figure.
Instructions: 1. Enter the number of a company's employees. 2. Enter the average number of intranet pages each
employee visits per day. 3. Enter the average number of seconds of confusion
per page a company's intranet users will experience. That is, the
number of seconds a user says "This isn't what I'm looking
for." A typical range is between 5 and 20 seconds. 4. Enter the average employee's annual salary. 5. Push the Calculate button. 6. Results appear in the box below.
b. # of Page Visits per Day per Employee:
c. "Confusion Seconds" per Page:
d. Average Employee Annual Salary: $
Annual Cost of a Poorly Designed Intranet:
Methodology
What the cost analyzer is doing is simple. It (1.)
calculates the total number of seconds per year a company's employees
waste looking for information on a poorly designed intranet; (2.)
calculates a company's per-second cost of employing an average employee*;
and then (3.) multiplies the two numbers. Granted,
it's rough, but it does shed some light on the cost of not finding
information.
* The cost analyzer asks for the average employee's salary, but
then doubles that amount to reflect the fully-loaded
cost of an employee.
