I was once in a meeting where the leader of the organization looked around the conference table and asked us to tell him what we didn’t know about each others’ departments.

If it were only that simple.

Once we realized that if we knew what we didn’t know about what each other did, we wouldn’t have needed the meeting, we set down to the important part of learning what each department did so that we didn’t have misunderstandings. One thing that we discovered was that it was the small things, the fine little details that often made the biggest differences and created the greatest confusion.

That’s likely true in any communication, even site design. There are assumptions that the web creator can make about his or her visitors that may be wrong.

If you’re running an intranet site for a corporation where employees need to rely upon what is published there, life can be easier. You can run a “needs assessment” on those people before they use those pages, and train them on things they might not know. Or, not.

There are a number of seemingly insignificant features to a web site that designers often take for granted, which their visitors might not be aware of, regardless of whether those are on an intranet, or on the internet itself. Assumptions so seemingly small that they might not even be considered by a trainer.

An IBM article, entitled Seven Tricks that Web Users Don’t Know, captures some of the features that many of us may take for granted.

For instance, that the logos on many sites link back to the home page. How many of the other six did you know? How many of them are things that your visitors might not know?