Intranet Usability: Usability Week 2012 Conference

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
- Locations
- Languages
Work/life balance
- Classifieds
- Personal and team-related accomplishments
- Cafeteria menus

Format

This full-day tutorial includes lectures, discussions, and exercises.

Course Materials

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.

Instructors

Kara Pernice is the Managing Director at Nielsen Norman Group. She has more than 20 years of experience in UX design and research, and has established successful usability programs at Lotus Development, Iris Associates (an IBM subsidiary), and Interleaf. She chaired the Usability Professionals’ Association 2000 and 2001 conferences, and served as 2002 conference advisor. She has led many of NN/g’s intercontinental research studies and generated the resulting design guidelines. She coauthored the book Eyetracking Web Usability as well as many other research reports, including Designing Corporate Intranets, Designing for Accessibility, Designing for People Over the Age of 65, and Designing Websites to Maximize Press Relations. She judged the submissions for and coauthored NN/g’s its Intranet Design Annuals since 2001 (2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, and Government Intranets Report). She is a leading authority on intranet usability and eyetracking usability (The Wall Street Journal called her “an intranet guru”). She has also done extensive research in evaluating emotion and design, given presentations on a wide range of topics, and worked with clients in various industries, including publishing, entertainment, technology, finance, pharmaceuticals, and government. She has more than 20 years of experience in UX design and research, and has established successful usability programs at Lotus Development, Iris Associates (an IBM subsidiary), and Interleaf. She chaired the Usability Professionals’ Association 2000 and 2001 conferences, and served as 2002 conference advisor. She holds an M.B.A. from Northeastern University and a B.A. from Simmons College. Presenting in Amsterdam and Washington D.C..

Amy Schade is a Director based in Nielsen Norman Group’s Chicago office. Schade works with clients internationally in telecommunications, e-commerce, government, travel, automotive, publishing, banking, non-profit and education, including extensive work on corporate intranets. She has conducted user research and performed reviews on a wide variety of websites in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia. She presents tutorials on user testing, intranet usability, writing for the Web, email newsletter usability and mobile usability. She authored the NN/g reports on intranet usability, intranet information architecture, email newsletters, and site map usability, as well as the 2010, 2011, and 2012 Intranet Design Annuals, and conducted many user test sessions for reports on accessibility and usability for senior citizens. Before joining NN/g, Schade was an information architect at Arc eConsultancy, where she created and revised architectures for sites ranging from a family-related content site to a transaction-based sponsorship marketplace. Schade has also held various positions in web production and advertising. She has a Master's degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and a B.A. in Communications from the University of Pennsylvania. Presenting in Chicago.