Intranet Usability: Workshop with Design Guidelines, User Test Results, and Review of Your Intranet

Nielsen Norman Group Tutorial

Intranet Usability

		Three-day workshop and review of your intranet: $23,000. Also available as a 1 or 2-day tutorial: $9,000 or $16,000. Travel costs extra. Prices higher outside the United States.

Outline		Intranets are important tools for communication, business processes, document storage, and information retrieval at organizations large and small. But because many intranets are pieced together, suffer from resource and budget issues, and are developed by many different groups with different design ideas, they often have the effect of frustrating users and wasting precious work hours in fruitless searches for information. Our usability research and intranet design competitions have helped us develop conclusions about what makes a well-designed intranet and how you can build one in any organization. The course covers guidelines and lessons learned from our user testing of 27 intranets at companies large and small in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Most important, the course will cover examples of many different intranets, both well-designed ones and those with usability issues. Unlike Internet website designers, many intranet designers never have the opportunity to see any intranet other than their own. Attendees will learn what worked and what didn't work in user testing of these widely different designs. The seminar will also include lessons and examples from the intranet design competitions and will discuss the reasoning behind the winning design decisions. The full version of this workshop compares the findings from these many other companies with an evaluation of your own intranet.

Workshop Outline		Day 1: we conduct a usability review of your intranet Day 2: tutorial for your entire intranet team (lecture format, based on findings from user testing of intranets in 27 companies) Review of intranets: general goals, components, and features Discussion of usability guidelines, including design examples and usability test results Personalization and login Search and navigation Killer apps and anti-killer apps News and content Usability of common applications and features, such as: human resource information employee directory time sheets job listings policies expense reports information about internal organizations Management and organizational issues that impact intranet design Tips for conducting your own intranet usability tests with a small budget and tight schedule Day 3: hands-on workshop for your core team about the lessons from the review of your own design (compared with the lessons from other intranets presented the previous day) and where to take your intranet in the future

Shorter Format		We can also present intranet usability as a traditional tutorial, with lectures presenting lessons, statistics, and examples from our intranet user research. This abbreviated version does not include a review of your own intranet. This tutorial can be either one day or two days, as required. There will be no review and no hands-on workshop in this simplified format. The advantages are obvious: lower price and fewer days. (For small intranet teams, the very lowest-cost option is to attend our public tutorial on intranet usability. It's cheaper to have us present an in-house tutorial if you have at least ten people attend, but for 1-9 people, it's cheapest to pay the conference registration fee. If you are not local to the conference and have to add travel expenses, it's usually cheapest to go to the conference for 1-4 people and to have an in-house seminar for 5 or more.) The downside of the shorter format is that you don't get the specific usability findings regarding your own intranet but only the findings from 27 other companies' intranets. Most clients find the full version to be the better value, but we are happy to come and present to your team in either format.

Practical Issues		For the usability review on Day 1, you need to provide our intranet usability expert with a quiet workspace and a computer with access to the intranet and a printer. Furthermore, a member of the intranet team should be available all day to answer questions and help with any problems accessing the intranet. This person will be able to get some other work done during the day but should not leave the building or be in meetings. (It's possible for two members of the intranet team to share this duty, as long as one of them is available at all times.)

Who Should Attend		Anybody working on the design of a company's intranet or its intranet strategy. Attendees should have a general familiarity with intranets and their design.

How to Order		Please contact Nielsen Norman Group at info@nngroup.com if you are interested in more information or would like to request this workshop. Note that availability of our senior staff is highly variable: usually we need at least one month's notice. If you need the workshop on a specific date or if international travel is involved, two to three months' notice would be preferable. The listed price is for workshops within the United States. Events in other countries have a higher cost.

How to Order

Please contact Nielsen Norman Group at info@nngroup.com if you are interested in more information or would like to request this workshop.

Note that availability of our senior staff is highly variable: usually we need at least one month's notice. If you need the workshop on a specific date or if international travel is involved, longer notice would be preferable.

NN/g Contact Information

Intranet Usability

Outline

Workshop Outline

Shorter Format

Practical Issues

Who Should Attend

How to Order