I just finished Nielsen-Norman Group's report "Intranet Design Annual 2009 - The year's 10 Best Intranets" by Kara Pernice, Patty Caya, and Jakob Nielsen. Its 478 pages profile the 10 best intranets worldwide, providing in-depth case studies of the design process for these intranets including business cases, development team profiles, timelines, governance, training, and marketing and communication plans, challenges, successes, and lessons learned. Along the way they provide helpful tips, such as "9 Traits of a Good CEO or Management blog."
I highly recommend this report to anyone involved in an intranet project, whether it's in the design stages or already in production. There is so much to learn from these successful teams, and the designs and functionality these intranets offer are inspiring. In this post I'd like to summarize the common themes.
The Nielsen Norman Group saw increases in:
- size of intranet teams (while organization size is getting smaller among the winners)
- internal ownership of the intranet user experience
- executive visibility for the intranet
- viewing of the intranet as a collaboration tool that supports work processes & improves efficiency
- social networking features
- SharePoint use - Half the winners used SharePoint as a platform, starting from 0 in 2006.
- user-centered design
- personalization – of news, tools, project information, and by language/location
- focus on new employees – information dedicated to them, plus news about new arrivals shared with the rest of the organization.
Additional trends they indicated:
- decentralization of organizations – 2 winners have no headquarters.
- consulting sector is best-represented industry, with 3 winners.
- predominant approach is to engage one or more consultants to contribute parts of the design – six of the ten were designed this way. (the rest designed completely by in-house staff; none designed by external agency alone).
Trends not specifically mentioned by the Nielsen Norman Group but which I saw among the winners:
- Little optimization of these intranets for mobile use, although many mentioned this as planned for a future phase.
- Strong and frequent use of graphical elements on the pages – not just in the headers but in the content areas.
- Rounded corners on the web parts, or angled components / navigational elements
- Suggestion boxes, polls, and surveys – ways to listen to the end-user, and specific efforts made by leadership to say, "I'm listening."
- Use of horizontal tabs (but seemingly no trend around number of tabs)
- Colors: green, orange, and blue used almost exclusively (one site used a red theme, one used black/charcoal gray); with gray in the secondary palette.
- Search on every page
- Human effort - hard work and dedication to providing content (i.e., a team to publish news stories or approve content, a blogging CEO) – the consistent message being that you can't just stand it up and then abandon it.
- Informal approach – use of cartoons, humor, snapshots, fun elements
- Competitions for the end-users as a way to get employees engaged (and another example of human effort needed from the intranet team to run these and make them successful)
As one who works exclusively with SharePoint intranets, two details of the report were really valuable for me:
- One of the winning intranets had the "Sharepointy" look, by which I mean it used the default, out-of-box master page and blue theme throughout. This makes clear that you don't have to invest in company-specific branding to have an outstanding intranet. The content and people elements can make it great.
- One company prototyped their Intranet home page using an Excel spreadsheet. This struck me as a realistic way to make a wireframe for a SharePoint-based intranet, because SharePoint is based on data and grids rather than a more fluid look and feel (as opposed to using a graphic design program which would take SharePoint's structure and limitations less into account).
I'd like to hand a copy of this report to each one of my clients. Specifically I'd like them all to read the Lessons Learned section at the end of each team profile, as well as the Nielsen-Norman Group's overall "Recommendations for the Intranet Design Process" at the end of the report. (The authors also include a "what not to do" section listing reasons why intranets were not included.) It's advice that can't be emphasized enough. I'll take this information with me into my future Intranet designs, but my passing on recommendations and best practices is not as powerful as the direct experience of reading these profiles.
