Intranet Usability 2
- New York: Tuesday, March 23
- Chicago: Saturday, April 24
- London: Friday, May 21
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, 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.
Instructors
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.
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.
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