Nielsen Norman GroupEvidence-Based User Experience Research, Training, and Consulting
Intranet design has come a long way in the past 10 years, but far too many organziations are still plagued wtih cumbersome, disorganized intranets. Far from being just an annoyance, these systems can make basic tasks so difficult that employee productivity is severly impacted.
To help companies and institutions optimize this essential resource, we conduct direct usability studies of intranets in a wide variety of industries, visiting companies at their location and reporting back the most important findings and guidelines. NN/g also holds an annual intranet design competition, from which we generate a collection of case studies showcasing intranets with great usability.
The articles below summarize many of the main findings from these two branches of research.
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Employee collaboration and open communication are now business drivers in many companies, but social enterprise features are often poorly integrated with the rest of the intranet.
Winners of the Intranet Design Annual competition for 2013, with summaries of key intranet design trends. The number of people on intranet teams grew substantially compared to earlier years.
Although intranet design is improving, it hasn't kept pace with increased complexity in enterprise requirements, so measured usability is down slightly.
Social networking and personalization rise to higher levels this year, while mobile intranets continue to cut their teeth. Also, smaller organizations get larger teams and better designs.
19 new case studies of enterprise portals find slow growth in new features; the focus is on robust integration and formalizing governance.
Knowledge management progressed from cliché to reality, based on simpler and thus more-used features. Mobile intranets doubled.
As intranet projects benefit from powerful implementation platforms, teams should focus on optimizing the user experience for specific organizational needs, as 4 winning examples show.
Intranet design is maturing and reaping the rewards of continuous quality improvement for traditional features, while embracing new trends like mobile access, emergency preparedness, and user/employee-contributed content.
Community features are spreading from 'Web 2.0' to 'Enterprise 2.0.' Research across 14 companies found that many are making productive use of social intranet features.
Intranets are getting more strategic, with increased collaboration support. Team size is growing by 12% per year, and platforms are becoming integrated, with a strong showing for SharePoint.
A usability analysis of 23 intranet portals finds strong growth, increasing collaboration features, and cross-functional governance.
Lists of links are an intermediate case between content-embedded links and menu items. Showing listed links in blue or in the site's main link color is the recommended design - and the one most intranets follow.
Consistent design and integrated IA are becoming standard on good intranets. This year's winners focused on productivity tools, employee self-service, access to knowledgeable people (as opposed to 'knowledge management'), and better-presented company news.
In analyzing 56 intranets, we found many common top-level categories, labels, and navigation designs, but ultimately, the diversity was too great to recommend a single IA.
Measured usability improved by 44% compared to our last large-scale intranet study. The new research identified 5 times the previous number of intranet design guidelines.
This year's winners emphasized an editorial approach to news on the homepage. They also took a pragmatic approach to many hyped 'Web 2.0' techniques. While page design is getting more standardized, there's no agreement on CMS or technology platforms for good intranet design.
This year, we saw increased use of multimedia, e-learning, internal blogs, and mobile access. Winning companies also encouraged consistent design by emphasizing training for content contributors.
An analysis of intranet portals found slimmer information architectures and a renewed emphasis on fresh content and useful applications. Past findings, including those on role-based personalization, were confirmed.
When using PC-native file formats such as PDF or spreadsheets, users feel like they're interacting with a PC application. Because users are no longer browsing a website, they shouldn't be given a browser UI.
Intranet homepages have become very similar in their basic layout. Intranets that look the same can nonetheless differ drastically in usability due to different features and content.
On average, this year's winning intranets increased site use by 149% with designs that supported bigger screens, multinational users, collaboration, easily updated content, and factory-floor workers.
Redesigning an intranet for usability often more than doubled the use of these award-winning designs from ten public-sector organizations.
This year's winning intranet designs emphasized workflow support, self-service content management, and offloading tasks from email to collaboration tools. On average, companies spent three years between redesigns, and one year on the redesign itself.
Internet portals are virtually dead, but a portal approach can tame the unruly chaos on internal company networks. Intranet portals overcome many Internet portal limitations, and might be the best hope for productivity and a unified user experience.
Guidelines conflict on whether to limit intranet search to a single search box or dedicate an additional box to employee directory searches. There's theory to support both guidelines. What's up?
The average mid-sized company could gain $5 million per year in employee productivity by improving its intranet design to the top quartile level of a cross-company intranet usability study. The return on investment? One thousand percent or more.
This year's winning intranet designs emphasized integrated support of international offices, long development times (two years on average), one-stop start-up screens and single sign-in, and usability testing of interfaces for content contributors.
The best intranets of 2001 emphasize iterative design and standardized navigation, and feature collaboration tools and content management systems. On average, companies saw intranet use increase by 98% following their winning usability redesigns.
An intranet should have a single home page that integrates a directory hierarchy, search, and news. Most intranets are chaotic, under-funded, and lack design standards, causing huge losses in employee productivity.
Your intranet should have different visual style and navigational architecture from your website since users, tasks, and information all differ. Intranets should be managed diversity; neither totalitarian nor anarchies
This paper presents the methods used to design the user interface and overall structure of Sun Microsystems' first intranet. Sun had an extensive set of information available on the WWW with the home page as the access point, but also wanted to provide employees access to internal information that could not be made available to the Internet at large.