Intranet Usability 2
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, you’ll learn the key characteristics of a well-designed intranet, and the steps
you can take to create one, including how to conduct intranet usability research. We’ll illustrate
seminar concepts with examples of many different real-world designs, and detail essential guidelines for
building the myriad features common to most intranets.
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
This tutorial will cover several topics, including:
- Studying users in their work environment
- Identifying typical intranet user behaviors
- Promoting your intranet
- Organizing your intranet
- Structuring the employee directory
- Designing common intranet elements, such as help-desk requests
- Creating effective forms and workflows
- Conducting intranet usability evaluations
Course Outline
- Introduction
- Understanding intranet users
- The intranet user experience: How employees commonly use intranets (based on our field studies); how intranet user behavior differs from Web user behavior
- Hunting strategies
- Conducting your own intranet usability studies and field studies
- Branding
- Naming the intranet and its areas
- Unified common design
- Advertising and marketing
- Methods used on the intranet and in other media
- Discussion—and design examples—of key usability guidelines, such as those for:
- Login
- Single sign-on
- Personalization and customization
- Navigation, menus, and terminology
- New browser windows
- Search
- The employee directory
- Human resources information
- Presenting content
- Presenting, organizing, and archiving: News, video, training
- Best practices for building a well-designed intranet
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 2 is a complement to Intranet Usability 1,
which covers intranet planning, management, and content management. It also discusses corporate culture and how an
intranet can best support the organization. Like this course, Intranet Usability 1 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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