Introducing the Intranet cart

Our users told us: ‘I wish I could choose my content on the Intranet and download it in one go’. We delivered them an Intranet cart and this generated some interest when I presented our new Intranet during the IntranetNow conference.

My word @ernstdecsey – we need to know more about your #intranet shopping cart! #IntranetNow

— Wedge (@Wedge) September 30, 2016

Observing our users we found that most were browsing through the pages to find the documents they needed to do their work, download them one by one on their local devices… and this was done repeatedly.

That made us think of what we do when we shop on Amazon.com or any other online store.

You browse the site, find the items that you want, add them to your shopping cart and then proceed to checkout.

So we introduced a cart on our new Intranet.

Our users can now add the documents that are most relevant to them in their cart in two ways:

They can either add all documents they find on a page

… or they can add specific documents found performing a search query directly in the search results page.

At the end of the process, once they have finalized their ‘shopping’, users can ‘pack & go’ with a downloadable zip package that contains all the documents they added to their cart.

This is the first iteration of this cart experience.

We already thought of improvements:

1. Allowing users to access again their previous carts to see what they ‘ordered’ in the past and possibly modify their order (i.e. add/remove documents).
2. Allowing users to be notified when a document previously added to a cart is modified.
3. Providing users suggestions for documents that are related to the ones they added in their cart.
4. Evolving the cart to allow users to choose whether they want their cart to be a virtual online cart with links to online documents or whether they want the more ‘classical’ downloadable zip package.
5. Allowing content publishers to use the cart feature to prepare ready made carts for their audience.
6. Including pictures, videos in the ‘shopping experience’ (currently only documents can be added to the cart).

And the evolution can be endless…

Have you seen this concept elsewhere? Would it be useful for you? How else could it evolve?

This post is a first of a series where I’ll describe some of the features of our new Intranet. Stay tuned.