Part of the Intranet Usability Guidelines Series

Having clear goals, the right technology deployed well, and a fair-sized staff isn't just good governance, it's a winning recipe for a great intranet. But teams can work around any situation if they know how. Good templates, standards, and examples are invaluable, as is planning for organizational growth and change.

This 98-page report contains 29 recommendations based on our usability research. Discussions and 36 screenshot illustrations supplement the findings.

Topics

• Increase monetary and non-monetary support for the intranet
• Supporting the organization's tasks and culture
• Planning intranet design and features
• Learn how to best implement new features through a recommended design process
• Adequate management support
• Adequate funding
• Not enough staff
• Intranet teams in the organizational context
• The roles of team members
• Intranet goals
• Estimate whether it's worthwhile to put a feature on the intranet
• Most popular intranet features
• The anti killer-app: Unpopular features
• Take inventory to improve the intranet
• Third-party solutions
• Templates and standards
• Deriving guidelines and templates and getting them implemented
• The intranet’s history

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).

In addition, this report includes findings from data obtained from surveys given out at multiple Nielsen Norman Group Usability Week conferences to intranet designers.