Usability Week 2009
San Francisco
Jun 22-27		 New York
Jul 13-17		 Sydney
Jul 27-Aug 1		 Edinburgh
Sep 14-18

Intranet Usability 2

  • San Francisco: Saturday, June 27
  • New York: Not offered
  • Sydney: Not offered
  • Edinburgh: Not offered

Kara Pernice
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

  • Study your users in their work environment
  • Identify typical intranet user behaviors
  • Promote your intranet
  • Organize your intranet
  • Structure the employee directory
  • Design common intranet elements, such as help-desk requests and job listings
  • Create effective forms and workflows
  • Conduct 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 of usability guidelines, including many design examples for elements, including:
    • Login
    • Personalization and customization
    • Navigation, menus, and terminology
    • PDF files
    • New browser windows
    • Search
    • The employee directory
    • Human resources information
    • Job listings and the job-application process
    • Presenting text
    • Forms and workflow processes: Time sheets, job listings, expense reports, help desk requests
    • Presenting, organizing, and archiving: News, video, training
    • Best practices for building a well-designed intranet

Format

This full-day tutorial includes lectures, along with 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.

Related

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

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 M.B.A. from Northeastern University and a B.A. from Simmons College.