Summary

Think you have a good intranet? Enter it for the award. Previous years' winners got substantial publicity and recognition from being honored in the Design Annuals.

Eligible designs: Anything that runs inside a company and is not accessible on the public Web. This includes:

• company-wide intranets
• department-specific intranets
• solutions to internal communications problems through intranet technology
• internal Web-based applications
• extranets

Deadline: Friday, July 11, 2008.

Submission Guidelines

There are two parts to the initial submission:

1. information about the intranet project and people involved, and
2. screenshots of the intranet.

We will ask the top ten intranets to answer more questions and to submit more screenshots. You will be notified by September if you are among the top ten intranets selected.

We will publish a report with the screenshots from the winning intranets as well as the information about their project and design process. We will also sometimes use the best screenshots in our conference presentations. Only submit material that you are willing to see published. The report will be read by tens of thousands of intranet professionals, so being published is a major PR opportunity for the winners, but the broad readership means that you should not submit any confidential information.

We will never disclose the names or other information from the submissions that do not win -- only the top ten will be in the report. Thus, this competition has no losers; only winners.

There is no fee to enter.

Part One: Information

Ideally, all text should be submitted in a MS Word document. Please provide the following information:

1. Name of the organization using the intranet
2. Name of the organization responsible for the design of the intranet. (Is it in-house or an outside design firm hired by the company?)
3. Names of people (usually designers) responsible for the intranet design
4. Job titles for those people
5. Contact name (we can use to clarify any questions and follow up with.) For that person, please include an e-mail address, mailing address, and telephone number
6. Brief description (less than 100 words) of the organization using the intranet, and if applicable, a short description of the agency that designed the intranet
7. Where the organization headquarters is located
8. Short description (300-500 words) of the intranet. Please include:
   • Goal of the intranet
   • Basic features
   • Description of users it supports and the types of jobs they do. If possible, also include the approximate number of users it supports, and the geographic locations.
   • Description of user tasks it supports
   • Anything that makes the design particularly interesting or usable
9. Finally, briefly describe all screenshots included in part 2 of the submission (described below), and note the actual filename for easy reference.

Part Two: Screenshots

Please submit at least 8, but no more than 16 screenshots of the following pages of the intranet:

1. The homepage
2. If there are personalized homepages or other pages, please submit how they would look for a representative user and explain what elements of the page(s) change and how they change
3. Sample top-level navigation or directory listing
4. An example of a news item
5. One or more examples of application(s) that people use to do their job
6. An example of a department-level or other overview page
7. An example of a content-level page
8. An example of a calendar or address book if the site has one
9. Examples of any interesting or innovative designs or features

All screenshots should be saved in TIFF or PNG format. We prefer images of full page.

Each screenshot should be saved in a separate file. Please do not put pictures in a document or presentation file.

Describe all screenshots and reference the exact filename in the Information document. (See above.)

If the text in the screenshots is not in English, please also include an explanation of what the screens say. (You don't need to provide a full translation of everything, but do translate all important features and elements.)

Do not put callouts or captions on the screenshots themselves. Instead, place all descriptive text in the accompanying text file.

Name screenshot files so it is very easy to decipher what they are by the name. We prefer the following way:

CompanyName_#_PageDescription_Version.tif

where "#" is a serial number that's incremented by 1 for each of your screenshots.

For example, if your company name is ACME, and you submit a screenshot of the homepage on the live intranet site, and a two previous versions of the design, you would save these in three separate graphic files, and name them this:

• Acme_1_home_live.tif
• Acme_2_home_version1.tif
• Acme_3_home_version2.tif

Only send us screenshots that you are happy to have reproduced in the report if you win. Please replace any confidential information in the screenshots with dummy text.

Sending Entries

When e-mailing the submission, please:

• Compress all files into a single ZIP file before mailing them.
• Keep e-mail attachments to 5 MB or smaller, to get through our mail servers. Multiple e-mails are fine, as long as they are labeled as such.
• To avoid spam killers, use this subject line for your email message: Intranet submission: your-company-name.

Please send parts 1 and 2 of the submission (described above) by e-mail to:

> Patty Caya at Nielsen Norman Group: intranet@nngroup.com

Deadline: Friday, July 11, 2008.

You will hear from us to confirm your entry was received. (If you don't hear within 48 hours, please follow up with a brief email to ensure we received it.)

Sector-Specific Intranets:
> Financial Services
> Technology Companies
> Manufacturing Industry
> Retail Sector
> Knowledge-Intensive
> Government Agencies

Intranet Portals
Report from the trenches.

Intranet Information Architecture (IA)
Analysis of 56 companies' IA.

User Research and Intranet Design Guidelines
For this series of 10 reports, we tested 27 intranets with real employees from each company to find out what worked and didn't work across a broad set of intranet designs.

> in-house seminar for your intranet team
> public tutorial at the Usability Week 2008 conference (San Francisco and Melbourne)

We can conduct a usability review of your intranet.