Summary

If selected, your organization will receive a free round of usability testing from Nielsen Norman Group. At some sites, we will also conduct field study visits with employees to watch them work in their own environment. The Nielsen Norman Group facilitator will discuss the findings with your team at the end of the sessions in a post-test discussion.

You will also receive a copy of the final research report after research is complete and the report is written, as well as 3 free conference registrations, allowing any three delegates from your organization to attend every day of our Las Vegas, Nevada, USA usability conference from December 5-10, 2010.

Participating organizations will allow Nielsen Norman Group to present findings from the study and screenshots of the intranet in reports and presentations. You will have the opportunity to erase any confidential information from the screenshots before they are published.

Eligible designs: Anything that runs inside a company or organization (and is not accessible on the public Internet). Eligible designs include:

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

Intranets must be available in English and the test users must speak sufficient English to participate in the research.

Time Schedule

You will be notified by September 27, 2010 whether or not your intranet is selected as part of our study.

Details

At some companies, we may also conduct field studies, with an NN/g representative visiting selected employees in their work environments, watching them use the intranet and complete their daily work.

If selected, the organization is responsible for the following:

• Recruiting 4 or 5 employees at your organization to be usability study participants. We'll give you recruiting guidance.
• Providing a room with a PC connected to your intranet that NN/g can use for the length of our visit, to review the intranet and run the study.
• Being available to answer questions about your site, while we are onsite and afterwards. We'll need you or someone who knows the intranet well to help us.
• Reviewing screenshots of your intranet for confidential information and replacing any confidential information with dummy text.
• Possibly recruiting 2-3 employees to participate in half-day field studies, where an NN/g representative will follow the employee during the course of the normal workday.

Submission Guidelines

1. Information about the intranet
2. Screenshots of the intranet

Part One: Information

1. Name of the organization using the intranet
2. Industry
3. Location of the organization's headquarters and where we'll study the intranet (if not at headquarters)
4. Contact name, e-mail address, mailing address and telephone number. (Used to clarify any questions and follow-up for scheduling)
5. Brief description (less than 100 words) of the organization using the intranet.
6. Short description (300-350 words) of the intranet. Please include:
   • Goal of the intranet
   • Basic features and descriptions of user tasks the site supports
   • User types the site supports and the types of work they do
   • Approximate number of users the site supports and geographic locations of those users. Include information about if users typically use the site in the office, remotely, from shared workstations or in another way.
   • What makes the design interesting or usable
7. Rate your intranet: Great usability, Okay usability, Poor usability
8. A list of all screenshots and a brief description of each (see part 2 of submission below).

Part Two: Screenshots

1. Homepage: general view and/or personalized view
2. Content-level page
3. Area for or about particular teams or projects
4. Employee profile page
5. Area where any user can post information (community areas, discussion forums)
6. Use of video
7. Social networking elements: comments, reviews, polls, blogs
8. Mobile version of the intranet

• 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 each screenshot as a file (NOT in a document or presentation)
• Describe each screenshot 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.

None of the screenshots you submit will be published unless your organization is selected to participate in the study. Even then, you will have the opportunity to remove or replace all confidential information.

Entries

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

Susan Pernice at Nielsen Norman Group:

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

Deadline: Friday, August 13, 2010

You will be notified by September 27, 2010 whether your intranet is selected.

Thank you for your interest in being part of our research study!

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

Intranet Portals
Report from the trenches.

"Enterprise 2.0"
Social Software on Intranets: A Report From the Front Lines of Enterprise Community, Collaboration, and Social Networking Projects.

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 annual Usability Week conference

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