Since 2001, NN/g has selected the 10 best intranets of the year. For 2022, the winning organizations are:

  • Banner Health (US), one of the largest nonprofit healthcare systems in the US
  • BNY Mellon (US), a global investments company
  • DBS Bank (Singapore), a leading financial services group
  • The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. (US), one of the world’s leading manufacturers and marketers of quality skin-care, makeup, fragrance, and hair-care products
  • International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) (US), a technology leader for over 100 years, currently focusing on AI and hybrid cloud technology
  • Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company (MassMutual) (US), a leading financial-services company that provides financial solutions, guidance, and education
  • Princeton University (US), a global research university with a distinctive commitment to undergraduate teaching
  • Publicis Sapient (US), a digital business-transformation company
  • Sorigué (Spain), a leading business group working in the fields of construction services, water, energy, and materials
  • Webuild S.p.A. (Italy), a global company that specializes in complex, sustainable infrastructure construction, including projects for mobility, hydro energy, clean water, and green buildings

In This Article:

Immersing yourself in this year’s intranet feature trends is like looking inside a classic fashion designer’s closet. The designs are solid and proven, the stable basics are present, and they fit many situations elegantly.

Several of the feature-related themes we call out this year have been important in past years, but this year they have a new twist, which makes the classics fittingly modern.

QR Codes for Seamless Transitions Between Channels

It has taken awhile for QR codes to find their place in the world, on the web, and on intranets. But this year’s intranet teams are using QR codes as strategic omnichannel tools to make finding information and transitioning between devices painless and simple. Transitions via QR codes that this year’s winners offered are:

  • Poster (print) to mobile intranet
  • TV monitor to mobile intranet
  • Desktop intranet to mobile intranet app

Intranet Everywhere

This year’s winning teams ensured that the intranet was accessible to all employees anytime, anywhere. Two major factors influenced this. First, the growth of mobile usage and the expectation of mobile access to the intranet was a catalyst. Second, since the pandemic forced employees to work remotely, intranet teams needed to find ways for employees to access all the information, resources, and tools they need, from anywhere.

A Focus on Sustainability

Organizations and intranet teams took a special interest in sustainability this year, with campaigns and features related to many different aspects of this topic. For example, organizations offered information about sustainability through news and engagement tools, like an interactive quiz to assess employees’ current knowledge of sustainability.

Creating a Sense of Unity

Intranets can be a conduit for unifying many corporate offices, teams, and individuals. Sharing knowledge, participating in discussions, and having employees feel confident that they have the most updated and consistent resources all contribute to creating a healthy, strong, and unified workforce.

Several winners this year leveraged the intranet to promote unifying people at the organization.

One-Stop View for Common Apps

Part of an intranet’s job is to consolidate and make accessible many of the apps that make up the digital workplace. This year’s intranet teams took this responsibility seriously.

The ELC intranet’s MyStatus page allowed employees to access IT tickets, requests, incidents, and key information from other applications without having to leave the intranet. On BNY Mellon’s intranet, components displayed status or content sourced from other applications.

DBS’s intranet had a Google Play-inspired app store where users could find all workplace apps and access reviews, star ratings, user guides, and ways to get support. Like DBS, MassMutual also had an application catalog for users to find their workplace applications.

Process Themes

A Focus on Accessibility and Inclusive Design

One of the strongest themes among this year’s winners (and all the submissions to this year’s contest) is accessibility and inclusion.

In the early 2000s, we saw teams begin to move toward creating designs that were accessible to all. But over the years, we have not seen accessibility become a driving force in intranet design. A few winning intranets have been champions of accessibility, but usually, if it was discussed at all, most attention was directed at making pages work well enough with screen readers. We might have seen a feature such as the three As (AAA) icon to help users quickly make text large, medium, or small. But this year is different. Teams are making a much greater commitment to accessibility.

While the design of accessibility features is usually concerned with the needs of people with disabilities, such as physical or cognitive challenges (e.g., blindness or low literacy), traditionally, it has not been concerned with areas related to employees’ background, race, gender, sexual identity, mental health, and wealth, which are usually counted under the umbrella of “inclusivity.” Intranet-design trends often follow those of web design, and today, the notion of inclusivity is at the forefront for many organizations and web designers. This year’s winning intranet team’s designers were right there with them.

This year, winning organizations’ inclusivity perspectives were often about making it easy for diverse individuals to relate to one another, the organization, and their customers. They held the beliefs that:

  • Diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives open doors for innovation and better problem solving.
  • Inclusion helps all employees to be productive, empathize with internal and external customers, and feel valued and safe being themselves at work.

The efforts that teams made to accommodate all users ranged from small to large and few to many. Some of the main accommodations included:

  • Text alternatives for all imagery
  • Full keyboard access (screen reader friendly)
  • Captions for audio and video
  • High contrast between text and background
  • Large and adjustable font sizes
  • Special, additional adjustments to features

Kudos to winners for their efforts toward accessibility and inclusivity in their processes and design.

Workshops for Stakeholder Alignment

Winning intranet teams involved stakeholders in ways that elicited everyone’s needs and desires without taking too much of their time. Rather than having endless meetings or editing documents asynchronously, teams opted to hold productive workshops. Generally, good workshops provide a framework in which stakeholders can easily communicate. With this format, teams can align with stakeholders at the beginning and throughout the intranet-creation process.

Personas for Prioritizing and Focusing on Users

Personas combine a set of real user traits to create realistic but fake user archetypes. They are an excellent way for teams to prioritize those user types on which to focus their designs and make many user types manageable.

Personas can be especially helpful for three important reasons:

  1. You are not the user. Because everyone at the organization is an intranet user, it’s easy for people who are on intranet teams to make the mistake of thinking they are the user to focus on. Sure, even team members are users, and, when we consider features related to support, the CMS, and analytics, we want to make them easy and engaging for the intranet-team members. But once you are part of an intranet team, you are no longer a regular user. You have a different perspective and probably know too much about the design to act typically. Having personas at the ready to refer to keeps the intranet team focused on typical employees and users of the intranet.
  2. Keep the right user focus. There are often many roles and user traits in organizations. On which do you focus? The most vocal or powerful leader may cause an intranet team to focus too much on one set of users. Personas can give intranet-team members a way to not only discuss target users with leaders but also to help the team remember to consider different user types.
  3. Part-time team members can reacclimate quickly. Some people work part time on the intranet. Maybe they work on other designs or in IT or write content part time. When people turn their focus back to the internet, personas can help them recall goals and target users.

This year’s winners saw the value of personas and used them to help create their designs.

Measuring Success at All Project Phases

Using quantitative and qualitative methods to track and measure how well the intranet is doing is a hallmark of great intranet-design teams. Site analytics, surveys, and benchmark user tests are a few of the methods used by this year’s teams. They used the performance data to derive insights, then adjust content, layout, features, and navigation.

Scope Out the Work of Others

In the world of intranets, imitation is far more than flattery; it’s a necessity. With limited resources, short schedules, and pressure to create a performing ecosystem of features and enterprise applications, intranet teams often turn to the work of others to inspire and assist them in their design process, make technology choices, and look for current trends in features, as well as look and feel.

Microsoft Technology Platforms

Teams used many different technologies to support their intranets. But for intranet platforms, 5 of the 10 teams primarily used Microsoft applications such as SharePoint and Office 356:

  • Banner Health used M365 cloud and Akumina.
  • DBS Bank used Liferay and SharePoint.
  • MassMutual used Cloud architecture (PaaS)—O365 (SharePoint Online, Azure AD, CDN, Graph API, Azure, and SQL DB).
  • Sorigué used SharePoint Online (Office 365).
  • Webuild S.p.A. used SharePoint 2016 OnPrem.

The other 5 winning designs used for their intranet platform:

  • Apache web and app server runs on Linux OS (BNY Mellon)
  • Drupal 9 (Princeton University)
  • LumApps (Publicis Sapient)
  • Unily (ELC)
  • Vue, NodeJS, GraphQL (IBM)

More details on the technologies used can be found in each company’s case study.

Many Tools Used Throughout the Design and Development Process

Teams used many different technology tools throughout their intranet creation process this year. These tools made many processes and tasks easier, faster, and more transparent to everyone on the team.

In addition to the necessary, expected tools needed for site building, search, and content management, teams used tools to assist in the following areas:

  • project management
  • bug tracking and quality assurance
  • design resources and creation
  • user research
  • documentation
  • code repository

Leveraging a Design System

A design system is used to vet, test, and share the best design patterns across an organization’s systems and teams. This promotes consistent, good design while safeguarding designers’ time for strategic and critical work.

Some intranet teams created their own design system for the intranet, while others leveraged the design system already in place for public-facing websites and applications.

Intranets Not Selected: Common Issues

The intranets showcased in our report are nothing short of amazing. The processes outlined by each winning team, combined with the advice they provide and the screenshots of their innovative designs, may give an impression of both brilliance and effortlessness. Brilliance? Yes. Effortlessness? Absolutely not.

The contest entries that didn’t make our shortlist of 10 drive home the point that creating intranets is incredibly hard work. Teams need to overcome technology challenges and organizational politics and reconcile the various goals and disparate needs of a broad audience of executives and end users. Additionally, even under the best conditions, creating useful, engaging, and usable designs is a tough ask.

Some of the issues we saw with entries that didn’t win this year are summarized in this section.

No Global Navigation or Search

We are all for minimalism in design. In fact, it’s one of Jakob Nielsen’s ten heuristics to follow for good design. But the areas in which to show restraint should be related to the feature set, unhelpful visuals, or bloated content. Removing the global navigation or search are not how we should practice minimalism or demonstrate restraint.

Intranets with no global navigation make it difficult for users to find information and tools. Similarly, skipping the search feature means people can’t directly navigate to areas they already know exist.

If your goal is minimalism in design or simply focusing employees via an immersive process flow, consider displaying a progress bar and presenting a visual design that makes the flow appear consistent between steps. But keep the global navigation and search so employees feel grounded and in control.

Deep, Unclear Global Navigation

It can be difficult to reduce levels of navigation, especially at large or complex organizations or at ones that have had an intranet for a long time and have vast amounts of content. Some intranet designs submitted to the contest offered navigation menus that were many — sometimes 6 or 7 — levels deep. There is no rule on how many levels become unusable or hard to manage. But, as navigation gets deeper, it’s especially necessary to demonstrate selection, grouping, and hierarchy. Bolding subheadings, using colors for sections, grouping or indenting to show hierarchy, and underlining or using arrows to show selection can be helpful. But as the hierarchy gets deeper, these techniques can become diluted and lose meaning for users.

No Page Hierarchy

The position, size, color, and spacing of page elements can indicate which are more important than others. But some designs don’t take advantage of the possibilities, and pages end up looking just messy and cluttered with no visual hierarchy.

Hideous Graphics

Okay, we agree that is a nasty subheading, but sometimes the truth is tough. Some of the images on intranets we saw were downright appalling. Why? Here are a few of the culprits:

  • Illegible, ornate typefaces
  • Retina-burning colors
  • Busy backgrounds with text overlaid on the image
  • The same or similar visuals used to describe very different offerings

As much as you may want to experiment with imagery, it’s safest to test it with prototypes in user studies, then refine it for the better based on feedback.

Vague, Repeated Link Names

While several entries this year, and certainly many of the winning designs, strongly promoted accessibility, some of the others did not. One frequent issue was vague link names. Click here to . . .and Read more make it difficult for screen reader users to locate the content of interest, as all the links sound the same to them. Using unique, concise, descriptive link labels can help screen-reader users and sighted users alike.

Imposing Fun

Organizations are doing all they can to engage employees by offering services and events to retain them and bring them joy. But naming a feature or activity something like The fun wizard or The festive calendar is presumptuous and can be off-putting.

Let the feature or activity speak for itself. Describe it thoroughly. Use quotes from employees that demonstrate why the feature is interesting or fun, rather than trying to push the impression on them.

 

Details on each of the 10 case studies, design screenshots, and lessons learned by the winning designers can be found in the 2022 Intranet Design Annual Report.

Submit Your Intranet to Win the Next Design Annual!

Have a great intranet? Large or small, your site could win next year’s Intranet Design Annual competition. But you must enter to win. Please check http://www.nngroup.com/intranet-call-for-entries/ for the exact dates and submission guidelines.