Summary

The report has two components:

1. The special competition we ran to identify the ten best government intranets.
2. Reprints of case studies from past year's Intranet Design Annual reports.

The intranets represent government organizations at the federal/national level, state/regional level, and city/local level. The average size of the winning organizations was 5,200 employees, but winners ranged from 400 to 15,000 employees.

> Read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: main trends in this design competition
> See sample chapter as thumbnails

Did you miss earlier editions of the Intranet Design Annual?

This is your chance to catch up on the in-depth case studies of past winners from the public sector.

Of course, some of these profiles are a few years old by now, and the winning intranets may have been redesigned and don't look like the screenshots in their write-ups anymore. But even the oldest winners still contain many good ideas that the vast majority of intranets today would do well in emulating. And the war stories of what it took the winning teams to persevere and get a great design done certainly continue to ring true today, as they will ten years from now.

Best Practices

• Workflow support
• Ensuring fresh content
• Driving unified design through the organization
• Consistent navigation
• Integration of intranet with real-time mobile notification
• Development process for intranet redesigns
• Coordinating agency-level and government-level design
• Ensuring accessibility for employees with disabilities, beyond simple compliance with Section 508 (U.S.) or the Disability Discrimination Act (U.K.)

Table of Contents

263-page report with 144 screenshots

• Executive Summary
  • Impact of Agency Size
  • Encouraging and Managing Content Contributors
  • Workflow Support
  • Help From Higher Level Offices
  • Technology
  • Usability Methods
  • Improvements in Metrics
• Special Award for 10 Best Government Intranets
  • Common Themes Among the Winners
    • Devise a Consistent Design to Integrate Many Intranets
    • Include accessibility features
    • Support Users in Many Locations
    • Offer Authoritative, Accurate Content
    • Enhance Corporate Goals
    • Create Happy Users
  • Defense Finance and Accounting Service (U.S.)
    • 16 pages
    • 9 screenshots
  • Department for Transport (U.K.)
    • 12 pages
    • 6 screenshots
  • Department for Victorian Communities (Australia)
    • 14 pages
    • 8 screenshots
  • Department of Veterans Affairs Mid-Atlantic Health Care Network (U.S.)
    • 13 pages
    • 6 screenshots
  • Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond (U.S.)
    • 14 pages
    • 7 screenshots
  • Government Offices of Sweden (Regeringskansliet)
    • 13 pages
    • 7 screenshots
  • London Underground
    • 14 pages
    • 9 screenshots
  • National Research Council of Canada, Industrial Research Assistance Program
    • 11 pages
    • 5 screenshots
  • Senate Republican Conference (U.S.)
    • 12 pages
    • 7 screenshots
  • Workplace Safety and Insurance Board of Ontario (Canada)
    • 13 pages
    • 9 screenshots
  • Recommendations for the Intranet Design Process
    • Conduct Many Usability Evaluations and Visit Users
    • Make Accessibility Design a Part of the Process, Not an Afterthought
    • Partner with your Corporate Communications team
    • Track Your Successes
  • Intranets Not Selected: Common Issues
    • Homepage Lacked Information
    • Poor Page layout
    • Navigation That is Neither Consistent nor Persistent
  • Selection Criteria and Process
    • Summary of Submissions
    • Review Process
    • Initial Design Reviews and Rankings
    • Design Sorting and Thorough Design Review
    • Follow-up Interviews with Top Ten
• Intranet Design Annual Winners
• United States Department of Transportation: DOTnet (2001 winner)
  • 7 pages
  • 4 screenshots
• World Bank Group (2002 winner)
  • 16 pages
  • 10 screenshots
• United States Coast Guard (2003 winner)
  • 12 pages
  • 6 screenshots
• Ministry of Transport, New Zealand (2008 winner)
  • 29 pages
  • 16 screenshots
• New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, Australia (2008 winner)
  • 49 pages
  • 35 screenshots

Who Should Read This Report?

• Anybody in charge of an intranet or its design, within the public sector, unless they have already read all past editions of the Intranet Design Annual.

Collecting similar benchmarking and best practice information from a large set of intranets yourself would probably take you two to three months, if you could ever get enough other agencies to let you in the door. Realistically, reading this report is the only way you will get the scoop on this many intranet projects.

Please help us continue publish low-price reports by buying a site license if you have colleagues who will read the report. If you only need it for yourself, then that's obviously what the single-user license is for. If somebody "gives" you a copy, then please buy a download anyway to keep prices down in the future.

Download Report (from eSellerate) $148 for the PDF file (263 pages, 144 screenshots), single-user license $348 for a site license to make copies and place on your intranet

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

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.

• Check
• Bank transfer
• Purchase orders
• Faxed or mailed credit cards

We can also send you a paper invoice if your company requires that.

> in-house seminar for your intranet team
> public tutorial at our annual usability conference

We can conduct a usability review of your intranet.