![]() “Well, they’re not going to want to do this if they’re on their phone,” and “they’re not going to want to read that if they’re on their phone,” and “they’re only going to do this if they’re on desktop.” I went through all of that stuff. How does Citrix think about those two words, mobile and desktop? And how did that shape the responsive product? Mike:Īctually one of the first things that I did when we first kicked off this project was I did a presentation to the entire group, and one of the parts of that presentation was to go right at some of those preconceptions that people were going to have about mobile. We’ve matured past that a little bit, but one of the things I hear when talking to people that are redesigning intranets is that there’s almost a desktop context when you’re designing for internal users who might be seated at workstations or the like. One thing that struck me in listening to you is in the early days of responsive design, there was all this talk about the so-called mobile context, that mobile users were on the go, running down the street trying to catch a bus, so we should be providing them with less information. One of our key drivers, and it goes right in line with what Citrix tries to promote with all the products and services that we sell, was this any time, any where, any device connectivity. The bigger challenges came around trying to convince people to not jump in and start designing a website, but to drop back and start looking at their content. ![]() They just didn’t have anybody here at that time who had much experience with responsive, and that’s why I was hired on in the beginning. Like I said, they brought me on specifically because they had decided to do the intranet responsive. I’m always intrigued when organizations say that responsive “was a given” or a “no-brainer.” Were there any challenges in those initial conversations? Any concerns, frustrations, or difficult discussions that you had to have around responsive as an approach or a methodology? Mike: The buy-in was pretty straightforward, and once that was done we were off to the races. It was amazing how different it became once we got all the right people in the room at the same time and level set everybody on how we would approach things. I met with everybody, we held a huge team meeting up front, we got key stakeholders from pretty much every department that really hadn’t tackled this project or anything like this in that way prior. I came back in and proposed that “we need to work content out, think mobile first, and then build up progressive enhancement,” and all of those fun buzzwords that everybody is using. Responsive was already a given but what they really didn’t have was a great strategy at the beginning. We all dropped back and started from scratch and that’s when I went in and proposed that we start working this from a whole different perspective. The project had been started by a different team within Citrix and when they realized that it kind of wasn’t getting to where they wanted to go-no fault to the people who were currently working on it-but it just wasn’t progressing the way they had thought. I was brought in specifically because of having some background in responsive design from my previous place, so I just jumped right in. ![]() That became one of our foundations for how we wanted to rebuild the whole thing and make it much more search-centric rather than a very navigation-driven type of experience. Probably the single biggest one that we had heard about was the really poor relevancy of search results. But we noticed there were some issues with that. ![]() It was previously built on SharePoint, which is pretty common for most intranets. The intranet serves about 10,000 employees. I was the lead UX architect on our redesign of the corporate intranet. So, perhaps tell us a little bit about that. This is the first time we’ve had a guest on the show that’s going to talk about a responsive intranet. I’d love it if you could introduce yourself tell us a little bit about what you do at Citrix. Karen:Īnd this week I am just about beside myself with excitement to have Mike Donahue from Citrix joining us. Ethan:Īnd I’m your other host, Ethan Marcotte. Hi, this is a responsive web design podcast, where we interview the people who make responsive designs happen.
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