| Email, instant messages, and text have taken the human out of human interaction. (Well, at least the face time.) And sometimes people at organizations don't even know what is happening in their own back yard. They don't know what other teams at the company are doing and there is no way to find out, short of walking up to the strangers and asking.
Good intranets offer thorough descriptions about the teams at the organization, and organizational charts to supplement them. Doing this helps to build a community, and it's never bad for a person to see a little more of the company's big picture.
The employee directory is the most important and most used feature on most intranets. Many people use this every day, maybe even several times a day to find information about colleagues and groups. Ensuring it is easy to use will help people to actually find each other, and do so quickly.
(Searching the employee directory is covered in the report on usability of intranet search.)
The report contains a total of 63 design guidelines, based on usability testing of 27 intranets. These best practices provide a checklist of specific issues to look for in your design, thus making the analysis and examples highly actionable.
Based on empirical data on real employees' behaviors while using real intranets. This shows what works and what doesn't work in real life, across a very broad range of intranet designs. (In contrast, most other writings on intranet design are either pure speculation — what the author thinks users prefer or would like users to do — or they are based on observations from a single company's intranet.)
134 pages. Richly illustrated with 122 color screenshots from many different intranets, showing usability problems we found in our testing as well as examples of highly-usable design.
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Complete Report Series
Collected Intranet Usability Guidelines