Summary

Think you have a good intranet? Enter it for the award. Previous years' winners received 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, including:

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

Competition Opens: Monday, May 24, 2010

Deadline: Thursday, July 1, 2010

Participation: There is no fee to enter. See the submission guidelines below.

We never disclose the names from any entries that do not win — only the top ten will be in the report. Thus, this competition has no losers; only winners.

Winners will be notified in August.

The Design Annual includes a comprehensive case study of each winning site. Thus, in August, all winning intranet teams must provide answers to a broad set of questions about their intranets, covering topics such as background, development, design, content and process. In addition to the written questions, we may also conduct phone interviews with your team.

Submission Guidelines

Part One: Information

1. Name of the organization using the intranet
2. Location of organization's headquarters
3. Name of the organization responsible for the design of the intranet. (In-house, outside agency hired by the company, or a combination of the two?)
4. Contact name, e-mail address, mailing address and telephone number (Used to clarify any questions and notify winners.)
5. 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 Short description (300-500 words) of the intranet. Please include:
   • Goal of the intranet
   • Basic features and description of user tasks the site supports
   • Types of users the site supports and types of work they do
   • Approximate number of users the site supports, and geographic locations of those users
   • What makes the design particularly interesting or usable

Part Two: Screenshots

1. Homepage (required)
2. Top-level navigation
3. Employee profile page
4. Form or data entry area
5. Department-level page
6. Content-level page
7. Example(s) of interesting or innovative designs, content or features
8. Mobile version of the intranet (if available)
9. If possible, 1–2 screenshots of the site before you made changes to improve usability. (We will only score the current design, but knowing where it came from helps understand its benefits)

• Take full-page images, showing as much as would be visible in a normal browser window
• Crop images to show only the site (not the browser window and controls)
• Save in PNG format
• Save as separate files (NOT in a document or presentation)
• Describe each in the Information document (see Part One)
• Do NOT put callouts or captions on the screenshots. Place all descriptive text in the Information document.
• If text in the screenshots is not in English, please also include an explanation of what the screens say. A full translation is not necessary, but do translate all important features and elements.)

CompanyName_#_PageDescription_Version.png

# is a serial number incremented by 1 for each screenshot. 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_01_home_live.png
• Acme_02_home_version1.png
• Acme_03_home_version2.png

Sending Entries

• 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 filters, use this subject line for your email message:
  Intranet contest: your-company-name

Susan Pernice at Nielsen Norman Group

Deadline: Thursday, July 1, 2010.

You will hear from us to confirm your entry was received. (If you don't hear within 2 business days, please email us.)

We will contact winners in August. At that time, we will ask the intranet team to answer further questions about the site and we will set up interviews with members of the team to develop the comprehensive case study for the Design Annual.

Thank you and good luck!

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.

Organizations are welcome to submit information for consideration for both reports. Please follow the (separate) submission procedure for each.