Promote employee contributions by setting examples, creating enticing topics of conversation, keeping a light tone of voice, and providing positive feedback.
An intranet can benefit small organizations if they have many remote employees, a high employee turnover, and low findability of company-related content.
While fairly popular, “lift and shift” is not a viable content strategy. It is a folly fueled by fear, limited resources, inexperience, and politics. There are better ways to ensure high-quality intranet content, and two award-winning designers offer their insights, proving that a bright attitude makes all the difference.
Intranet teams continue to grow, streamline processes, and produce innovative designs. Some feature trends include: responsive design, search filters, flat design, and megamenus.
A Quicklinks UI component often surfaces as a poor fix for addressing findability and discoverability issues on intranets. Acting as a catch-all for different types of links causes a separate set of issues. And Quicklinks is always a vague label.
Enterprise portals today drive usage with helpful applications, soar with role-based personalization, and employ a variety of user research methods, but lag in mobile optimization.
Two winning intranets—triptic and Abt Associates—use responsive design, prioritize their content, and employ elegant navigation to accommodate and optimize for multiple devices.
Intranets are improving findability and discoverability by organizing content by task, using mega-menus, offering wayfinding cues, and providing shortcuts.
Intranet team sizes continue to grow at a slow but steady pace, while smaller organizations are producing the best intranets. Focusing on Agile development and wireframing methods, intranet teams are completing design and deployment within much shorter timeframes.
Searching for colleagues is the most common task that employees do on intranets, and is arguably the most important task. Forms, news, and apps aid employee productivity, but you can't beat talking with the right people. Today's design patterns for intranet employee search make the act of finding people outrageously fast and easy.
Supporting field staff and mission-critical apps are core reasons to take enterprise computing mobile, but users also value access to news and internal social networks.
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.
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.