Usability Week 2010

Intranet Usability 1

  • New York: Monday, March 22
  • Chicago: Friday, April 23
  • London: Thursday, May 20

Kara Pernice
Amy Schade

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
    • Locations
    • Languages
  • 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.

Instructors

photo of Kara Pernice Kara Pernice is the Managing Director at Nielsen Norman Group and heads the company’s East Coast operations. She has led many of NN/g’s major intercontinental research studies, generated the resulting design guidelines, and coauthored several reports, including Designing Corporate Intranets, Designing for Accessibility, Designing for People Over the Age of 65, and Designing Websites to Maximize Press Relations. She is a leading authority on intranet usability and eyetracking usability (The Wall Street Journal called her “an intranet guru”). She judged the submissions for and coauthored NN/g’s Government Intranets Report and its Intranet Design Annuals in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009. 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 15 years of experience in evaluating usability 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 MBA from Northeastern University and a BA from Simmons College.
photo of Amy Schade Amy Schade is a User Experience Specialist based in Nielsen Norman Group’s East Coast office. Schade has worked with clients internationally in music, insurance, travel, banking, education, and e-commerce industries, and has conducted user testing and performed reviews on a wide variety of websites and intranets in the United States, Europe, and Asia. She presents tutorials and workshops on user testing, intranet usability, writing for the Web, and email newsletter usability. She co-authored the NN/g reports on intranet usability, intranet information architecture, email newsletters, and site map usability, and has conducted many of the 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 new media and advertising. She has an M.A. from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.