We have all struggled with corporate speak, where documents are characterised by their complexity. Now, imagine you have an intranet full of documents that users are struggling to decipher.

The key issue here is readability ­- how easy or difficult it is for people to understand text.

Users often skim text to find the information they need ­ and the more difficult a text is to understand, the more frustrating the process will be.

Readability is an important concept for intranets, but one that is often overlooked.
Not every document needs to be easy to read for all users. However, in our intranet benchmarks, we only measure readability for pages and documents that are intended to have a broad readership.

Measuring readability is surprisingly simple, since Microsoft Word provides several measures as part of its spelling and grammar options.

We use the Flesch Reading Ease Index, which is based on word and sentence length. Scopes should range between zero and 100, but the formula can sometimes produce scores outside of the range ­ and something is truly unreadable when it gets a negative score. The ideal range for adult readership is between 60 and 70.

Readability scores for intranets have so far been fairly disappointing, especially since large, global companies generally have the lowest scores.

Such results are somewhat ironic, considering that multinationals have many more intranet users whose first language is not English.

Large firms need higher readability scores ­ with shorter sentences. But large firms’ documents average an index reading of only 36. Key factors might include decentralised user-publishing models, meaning anyone can contribute to the intranet.

These models are often the biggest culprit, especially if there are no mechanisms in place to ensure the quality of content. An effective authorisation process is needed, or a centralised team to review content.

A culture of complexity is usually deeply ingrained and difficult to change. But research from Daniel Oppenheimer at Princeton University is unambiguous in how complexity relates to the scores given by participants to sample texts.

“Needless complexity leads to negative evaluations,” he says. “Complex texts are difficult to read, which leads to lower ratings.”

The complexity starts with client communications and spreads through the organisation. But not surprisingly, IBF members who have a culture of plain English do much better than all other groups in our evaluations.

Encouraging plain English might be more easily achieved in a financial services organisation than a global petrochemical or pharmaceutical company that has little direct contact with its consumers.

A need to recognise user diversity is often another big shift in organisations, since the predominant human trait is to assume everyone is like you. Such a shift requires training and a top-down push to get over the assumption that all intranet users are educated to university level and fluent in English.

Intranets can help bring equality to the workplace, but not while the content is understood by a limited few.

William Hudson is director of user experience at the Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF)