Intranet Usability 1
Full-Day Tutorial
An intranet typically houses both mission-critical applications and enormous amounts of
information. Whatever it offers, an intranet’s success—and that of the employees
it serves—hinges on usability.
In this seminar, we’ll detail top considerations for planning a best-practices intranet
and the art of running it—that is, the managerial aspects of intranet design. We’ll
also discuss intranet teams, content management, and how corporate culture influences an intranet.
This seminar is based on:
- Data and examples from research conducted on 27 intranets (including user testing and field studies)
- Research of 56 organizations’ intranet information architecture
- Insights gained from reviewing hundreds of intranet entries for NN/g’s Intranet Design Annual competition
In addition to numerous examples culled from our extensive research, we’ll present examples from winning
intranet designs drawn from our competition’s eight-year history.
What You’ll Learn
- Essential design elements and key characteristics of a well-designed intranet
- Guidelines for designing those elements
- Key steps for creating an effective, well-designed intranet
- What not to do
- The importance of goal-setting in site design
- How to reflect corporate culture and organizational goals
- Keys to creating and managing content
- How to use the intranet as a communication tool
- Basics ways to benchmark your intranet’s usability against others
Course Outline
- Introduction
- Study methodology
- Test tasks
- Common intranet tasks
- Numeric findings from usability sessions
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Review of intranets studied
- Organizations studied
- Users supported
- How the intranets started
- Planning the intranet
- Intranet teams: Models, common roles, goals
- Management topics
- Creating standards and guidelines
- Using the intranet to support corporate culture
- Killer apps
- Planning features
- Work/life balance
- Intranet design process
- Design goals
- Content management
- Approaches and processes
- Governance and management
- Training
- Open intranets
- Discussion of usability guidelines, including many design examples for elements such as:
- The homepage
- Project or team pages, and related features
- Corporate information: Company performance and management
- Multiple locations and languages
- Communication
- News
- Executive announcements: Q&A and video formats
- Social networking
- Knowledge-sharing for peers
- Processes for communicating using the intranet
- Print publications and online newsletters and email
- PDF files
- Multiple offices
- Work/life balance
- Classifieds
- Personal and team-related accomplishments
- Cafeteria menus
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lectures, discussions, and exercises.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides and a free copy of Nielsen Norman Group’s
research report Intranet Usability
Guidelines Vol. 1: Understanding and Studying Users (Test Data, User Behavior, and Methodology).
Who Should Attend
Anyone who works on intranet design or strategy and has not previously attended our
Intranet Usability tutorials. Attendees should have a general familiarity with intranets and their design.
See Also:
Intranet Usability 1 is a complement to Intranet Usability 2,
which covers many design guidelines and examples for good intranet usability, and also discusses intranet usability
research and how to best conduct it. Like this course, Intranet Usability 2 is a full-day, self-contained seminar;
you can take either seminar independently if you’re only interested in its particular topics. Taken together,
however, the two seminars cover the full range of intranet design issues and present a full range of intranet
usability findings.
Instructor
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