Intranets Articles & Videos

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2007

    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.

  • Ten Best Intranets of 2006

    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.

  • Intranet Portals Get Streamlined

    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.

  • The Canonical Intranet Homepage

    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.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2005

    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.

  • Ten Best Government Intranets

    Redesigning an intranet for usability often more than doubled the use of these award-winning designs from ten public-sector organizations.

  • Ten Best Intranets of 2003

    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.

  • Employee Directory Search: Resolving Conflicting Usability Guidelines

    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?

  • Intranet Usability: The Trillion-Dollar Question

    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.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2002

    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 10 Best Intranet Designs of 2001

    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.

  • Intranet Portals: The Corporate Information Infrastructure

    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.

  • The Difference Between Intranet and Internet Design

    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.