Part of the Intranet Usability Guidelines Series

The more employees are aware of the benefits the organization offers them the happier they will be. Organizations have a myriad of forms and related processes, which great intranets support with automated workflows. Intranets can do the work for users: filling in as much of the form as possible based on known information about the employee, routing the forms to the next place they need to go, and making it possible to track them.

This 217-page report contains 130 design recommendations based on our usability research. Discussions and 163 screenshot illustrations supplement the findings.

Benefits

• Best practices for form design and auto-populating form fields based on the user’s information
• Improve the user experience of finding benefits and policies, and completing the most common employee self-service tasks, including timesheet and expense reporting
• Checklist of 130 recommendations for improving online workflows

Topics

• Human resources benefits information
• Updating personal information
• Presenting and organizing forms
• Form design
• Populating form fields
• Downloadable forms (PDFs, documents, spreadsheets, etc.)
• Timesheets
• Expense reports
• Meeting room information and scheduling
• Technology help desk
• Finding and signing up for trainings
• Finding job openings
• Applying for open positions

Download report excerpt (2MB PDF)

Research Method

The information in these reports is based on three separate rounds of user research with company employees as participants. We used two different research methods:

• One-on-one usability testing
• Field studies, during which we observed employees as they went about their normal work

In total, 176 people tested 42 intranets. The studies took place in the United States, the United Kingdom, Finland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, United Arab Emirates, and China (Hong Kong).