10 Best Intranets of 2014

Winners

The organizations with the 10 best-designed intranets for 2014 are:

• Abt Associates, Inc., a global research firm (US)
• Air New Zealand, an airline (New Zealand)
• Allianz Australia, an insurance company (Australia)
• AMP, a wealth-management company (Australia)
• International Monetary Fund (IMF), an international financial and economic organization of 188 countries (US)
• Mayo Clinic, a not-for-profit group medical practice of physicians, scientists, and researchers (US)
• National Geographic, a non-profit scientific institution (US)
• Ooredoo, a communications company (Qatar)
• triptic, an online communications agency (The Netherlands)
• WellPoint, the Medicaid division of a health care solutions provider (US)

> Read more about the winning teams.

Most of our winners are full-scale intranet applications designed to serve their entire organization and a variety of job roles. One winner, WellPoint, offers a specialized intranet site that supports the Medicaid business of its Government Business Division.

Repeat Winners

In a Design Annual first, this year’s winners include 4 organizations that have had winning intranets in previous years:

• Allianz Australia (2006)
• AMP (2011)
• Mayo Clinic (2003)
• National Geographic (2007)

As every strong intranet team knows, work on an intranet is never truly finished. None of these repeat winners walked away from the intranet after creating a winning design. Rather, they demonstrated that a redesign project is only as good as its maintenance, upkeep, and consistent reevaluation. Organizational needs, technology offerings, and user expectations change over time; the most successful intranet teams respond to these changes.

Great Intranets Were Created Faster This Year

Buckle up, intranet designers, as you may be working faster than ever. Creating a new intranet, from beginning to end, took this year’s winning teams a streamlined 1.4 years (16.7 months) on average. This is a major drop from the 2013 winners, who spent an average of 2.2 years (26.6 months), and the 2012 winners, who spent 4 years (47.4 months) on average. We haven’t seen short timelines like this since the early 2000s, when intranets often housed far less content, involved far fewer contributors, and included more-basic search capabilities than they do today. Three of this year’s winners effectively used quick Agile approaches to development, which contributed to the lower average time required. The operative word here is effectively, as employing Agile is not silver bullet; if done well, however, it can certainly streamline a project.

Since 2001, intranet teams have spent an average of 3.5 years (41.7 months) creating their winning designs. This year, however, winners took less than a 1.5 years (16.7 months) to create their designs.

Seven Industries Represented

The 3 industries that have historically made a strong showing in the Design Annual include technology, finance, and utilities. Indeed, this year, the winners included two financial organizations and one utility. However, this marks the second year in a row that no technology companies have made the list of winners.

Following last year’s showing of 3 insurance companies, one insurance company made the cut this year. The other winners include two professional services firms (an online agency and a global research firm), a non-profit, two health care organizations, and a transportation company.

In summary, this year’s winners represent 7 industries:

• Financial (2)
• Health care (2)
• Professional services (2)
• Non-profit (1)
• Insurance (1)
• Transportation (1)
• Utility (1)

Five Countries Represented

Our winners hail from 3 regions around the world and 5 different countries. Five winners are from North America (all from the US). The Asia/Pacific region makes a particularly strong showing this year, with winners from Australia (2), New Zealand (1), and our first winner from Qatar. A single winner from Europe (The Netherlands) rounds out our top 10.

Surprising is the small showing for Europe, and no showings from the UK or Canada, which have had a strong presence in the past. Since the start of the Intranet Design Annual, winning companies have represented several regions:

• 56% have been from North America
• 31% from Europe or the UK
• 11% from Asia/Pacific (up from only 8% last year with this year’s 4 winners)
• 1% from South America
• 2% with no official headquarters

Intranet Teams Are Growing

The average intranet team size this year was 16 members. Although not as large as last year’s all-time high of 27 people, this year’s team sizes continue to reflect a gradual growth pattern over the past 13 years. This is great; however, many intranet teams continue to struggle with meeting their goals within time, technology, and political constraints. So, we hope and expect that team size will continue this gradual growth in order to make substantial progress in intranet design innovation.

We attribute team-size growth to several factors, including:

• Swelling commitment to the intranet as a powerful business and communication tool
• Better understanding of the need for good, usable user experiences
• Trial and error with team composition and size, aimed at achieving the right mix of people resources
• The push to integrate more tools, applications, content, and forms into the intranet design, and shifting people who once owned these processes onto intranet-related tasks
• Recognition that it’s beneficial to involve experts in certain areas, such as search and in programming third-party tools

The average intranet team size for winning organizations was 16 people this year. Although down from last year’s all-time high of 27 (which included one company’s 107-person team) this reflects the gradual growth we’ve seen over time, with average team size slowly increasing.

To further evaluate this factor, we look at team size in relation to the number of users the intranet supports. In all cases, a very small number of developers and designers greatly affect a much larger group of employees. With company size down this year and team size up slightly, team size as a percentage of company size was 0.138%, or 1.4 team members to support every 1,000 employees. Although slightly lower than last year, this number is almost double the previous years' percentages, and we hope this positive trend continues.

Smaller Companies are Designing the Best Intranets

The winning organizations’ sizes range from 20 users to 61,000, with a median organization size of 5,500 employees. Seven of our winning sites support fewer than 10,000 employees, with 4 of those supporting 5,000 employees or less. Since 2001, our winning sites have supported an average of 53,700 employees, but for the past 3 years, we’ve seen our winners representing increasingly smaller organizations. This year’s winners are our smallest set yet, averaging 11,600 employees (excluding 2004’s Annual, which was focused only on government intranets).

In recent years, the average number of employees at winning organizations was:

• 2009: 37,500
• 2010: 39,100 (excluding the mammoth outlier Walmart, with its 1.4 million store associates)
• 2011: 37,900
• 2012: 19,700
• 2013: 18,800

These numbers, which were essentially the same 3 years in a row (2009–2011), dropped in 2012 and 2013 and dropped even further this year. We don’t think this trend is an indication that large companies can’t make great intranets; rather, it’s that smaller companies are coming into their own. Among the other factors that might contribute to smaller companies’ intranet success are:

• An increasing awareness of the business value of facilitating employee communication and knowledge exchange across companies of all sizes
• The changing workforce — often distributed in many locations or working in the field — and the need to better support them via online media
• The penetration of social features into the workplace and the desire to offer them on the intranet
• The need to better curate the news and content communicated to employees online

Although these elements are important for large and small organizations alike, smaller organizations usually had less of a dire need for online communication and productivity applications before these trends emerged.

Responsive Design is Gaining Traction

A focus on mobile intranet access and design has been slow to gain purchase in past years of the Design Annual. But this year, more teams than ever before are supporting or planning for mobile access.

Several winners this year focused on mobile optimization in some capacity, and three winners took a responsive design approach to design and develop their intranet. Rather than create multiple sites to support multiple devices, the teams used responsive design to accommodate multiple devices while coding just one site.

In general, interface design time for a responsive intranet can seem longer than for a desktop-only intranet. In actuality, it is not necessarily longer, because it includes interface design for multiple devices rather than just one.

Additionally, the time spent in design for a responsive site can be saved in development time. Developing a responsive codebase that supports multiple screen sizes is more time consuming than creating a single desktop codebase, but it saves time over developing three distinct codebases for desktop, tablet, and mobile. It also makes for easier maintenance over time. Considering this potential time savings for the team — and the resulting ease of access across devices — a responsive design approach could be a very good strategy for many intranet redesigns.

Agile Development and Wireframing Improve Team Communication

This year’s winning teams stretched their skills and experimented with ways to create sites efficiently in a controlled project, which contributed to shortened project time frames. Three teams followed an Agile approach to their redesign projects. In the Agile methodology (which is not always followed by the book, nor is it manifested in the form of Scrum), teams state and communicate goals based on user needs, then work in short, defined cycles to design and code features. This model can be particularly effective in an intranet development environment in which many team members work on both the intranet and other projects. When such people return to their intranet project work, their goals — short- and long-term — are clearly defined and communicated. Essentially, people are focused about and confident in what they are working on.

Winning teams used wireframes and functional prototypes as blueprints for design, for communication, and for usability testing. Several teams found that early planning discussions and stakeholder meetings were greatly aided by the use of wireframes. Quick drawings helped shift conversations from nebulous concepts to concrete ideas about functionality, design, and content. Having wireframes to look at helped get teams on the same page.

Feature Trends

Strong feature trends this year include:

• Carousels. We could call this the “Year of the Intranet Carousel,” with eight of our 10 winners employing this design pattern in some way on their homepage. In general, the reasons designers often give for using a carousel are: 1) to fit more content in one parcel of homepage real estate, or 2) to settle political disputes about whose content is most deserving of a visible location. Whatever the reason, this year’s winners exemplified useful carousels.
• Persistent right rail. The rightmost column is often used effectively on intranet homepages to provide quick access to applications, and on article pages to display related links or social elements.
• Functional footers. For the first time, functional footers are finding a real home on intranets, offering feedback links, links to external sites, and search fields, as well as repeating links from the site navigation.
• Local search. Having a single search function for everything can sometimes return search results that are not helpful. An alternative is to offer a scoped search, in which users search within a particular intranet area. This UI can be very confusing if not designed well, but some of this year’s winners gave scoped search a facelift and applied it in helpful ways.
• Megamenus, present but shrinking. To avoid overwhelming employees with choices, several of our winning sites use megamenus to present menu links. Unlike with some sites, these teams employed usability testing and practiced constraint, which kept these megamenus from getting overly large and unwieldy. Instead, the menus effectively expose interior categories and key content areas.
• Filmstrip. Intranet teams opted to present a gallery-like viewing experience for highly related links and content.
• Flat and boxy. A flat and boxy aesthetic became hot with the introduction of Windows 8 and iOS 7; this look also makes an appearance in this year’s set of winning designs.
• Social. Social features came of age this year and are integrated, easy, and rewarding. We’re witnessing promising changes in expressions of social media on intranets, with prominent and visible tools that are well integrated into content areas. Teams are also making strides in motivating employees to update their own information and to contribute.

Easing Colleagues into the New Design

Savvy intranet teams realize that springing a new design on unsuspecting colleagues is asking for disaster. People are often quick to dislike something new, particularly when they don’t expect it.

Change management is a crucial part of intranet redesign projects. This year’s winning teams understood this. They communicated with their colleagues and — even more important — involved them early and throughout the redesign projects, helping make user needs clear and easing the transition to the new design.

Planning for Ongoing Success: Governance and Endless Change

Many winning intranet teams — including those at Allianz Australia, AMP, Mayo Clinic, and National Geographic — specifically planned for continual improvements post-launch, keeping resources in place, goals in mind, and governance committees convened. With this strategy, they’re making the intranet UX increasingly better for employees, and thus the organization.

Full Report

314-page Intranet Design Annual with 144 full-color screenshots of the 10 winners for 2014 is available for download.