We proudly present the winners of Nielsen Norman Group’s Intranet Design Annual (report), in its 20th anniversary year. Across two decades we have singled out the 10 best intranets of each year, making for a total of 200 inspiring intranets and their creators, who were pioneers in their winning year. This year’s winners are as impressive as ever. Following are the organizations with the 10 best-designed intranets for 2020:

  • Angelini Holding SpA (Italy), international group leader in the health and well-being area of the pharmaceutical and mass-market sectors
  • Bank Spoldzielczy we Wschowie (Poland), cooperative bank serving three Polish provinces
  • Barclays (UK), financial institution that moves, lends, invests, and protects money for customers and clients worldwide
  • Consolidated Edison, Inc. (US), one of the Unites States’ largest investor-owned energy-delivery companies, providing a range of energy-related products and services
  • Dynacare (Canada), one of Canada’s largest health solutions companies, offering services that include medical testing, insurance solutions, corporate wellness programs, advanced genetic testing, and digital health solutions
  • Husky Energy (Canada), integrated energy company with 30 office locations across Canada, the US, and Asia-Pacific
  • Korn Ferry (US), global organizational consulting firm, helping companies design their organization’s structure, roles, responsibilities, compensation, and development
  • Loblaw Companies Limited (Canada), Canada’s largest retailer, providing grocery, pharmacy, health and beauty, apparel, general merchandise, financial services, and wireless mobile products and services
  • United Nations (US), international organization that takes action on the challenges confronting humanity in the 21st century and offers a forum for countries to come together to tackle challenging issues
  • Wellcome Trust (UK), a health organization that supports researchers, campaigns for better science, and exists to improve health

Agile Development Triggers Rapid Intranet Development

Since 2015, more and more teams started reporting that they were employing some form of Agile development. In 2019 and again this year, all 10 winners reported that they had used an Agile development process. This process affects the intranet design in many ways, but the main one is that teams usually create one fairly large design release that is more comprehensive than the lean development’s minimum-viable-product (MVP) concept. This large release is then followed by many smaller iterations with minimal additions and changes. The main release includes many of the important features and a new visual look, while later iterations include a few features at most.

From 2001 to 2007, winning teams required an average of 3.3 years to create their intranets; from 2008 to 2013, the average creation time was 3.6 years. Beginning in 2014, however, the average time dropped to 1.4 years — an average time that has held ever since.

This year, it took teams anywhere from 8 to 48 months to create their winning designs. The disparity in timing can be attributed to reasons such as: the schedule and deadline that were set, resources, scope of the project, politics, and command over technology.

In addition to Agile approaches, teams’ development speed is also enhanced by the use of good intranet applications and tools for design and collaboration.

Finally, larger core teams — that is, more people working on the intranet — work faster and produce faster design releases. See the Larger Core Teams section of the report for more about team sizes.

Agile Development: Rousing Change and Creating Challenges

The Agile development process has changed intranet teams’ mentality and planning in various areas.

  • Working with agencies: Working in Agile means that teams plan their partnerships with outside agencies to extend beyond the main release and include planning for future smaller iterations. In other words, the partnership doesn’t end at the big launch, as it often did before iterations became popular. In consequence, teams must find additional budget to retain agencies. They can also engage in a long-term partnership with an agency that can truly learn the company’s business. Or, if a partnership was not a good fit, teams can try out new agencies on subsequent releases.
  • Creating and updating the global navigation: To create a good information architecture (IA), designers usually start with content, then begin grouping, naming, and organizing it. Based on those efforts, they create the global navigation menu. This process can pose challenges when working in Agile because features must be agreed on before they can be named and placed in the IA and, if appropriate, in the global navigation. But many teams working in Agile won’t know all the future features at the time of the initial release. Typical solutions to this problem are:1) Even if all planned commands don’t appear in the initial big release, the global navigation is designed (but not coded) before then. 2) The initial navigation design is scalable to accommodate additional commands, though ensuring a place for uncertain features is difficult. 3) The navigation-menu architecture is changed whenever an iterative release requires it, which is very disruptive to users.
  • Planning the intranet’s launch and related activities: Marketing activities at launch create buzz and awareness, and educate employees about features and the new-intranet’s benefits. Having multiple iterations means planning a large promotion for the main release, then continuing with smaller promotions for new features as they go live.

Core Teams

This year’s winning teams ranged from as few as 5 members (at both Dynacare and Korn Ferry) to as many as 80 (at Angelini). These numbers reflect the core intranet teams, which comprised internal and external staff and full- and part-time employees. They do not include extended team members, such as content authors or people working on short-term projects.

The average team size since 2001 is 14 people, although this year, six teams had smaller teams. Over time, the average team size doubled from 8 people (during the range 2002–2007) to 16 people (both for 2008–2013 and for 2014–2020). It seems that organizations have been devoting more resources to intranet teams in recent years, which we believe is a very positive development.

Creating and maintaining an intranet — no matter how much you automate and build good workflows — is still a manual job in many ways. And, as always, including individuals from across the organization requires deep research, along with considerable handholding and political maneuvering.

Including Outside Help

Intranet teams often create a completely new design in a short amount of time with few people. They also use technologies, employ development processes, and require expertise that their in-house staff may not have. Thus, they often bring in consultants for help.

Six of this year’s winning organizations looked to outside agencies and consultants to help with their intranet redesigns, typically bringing in one or two agencies each.

Key areas that teams sought help for included the following:

  • Agile coaching
  • Content creation and editor training
  • Development
  • Discovery
  • Ideation
  • Information architecture
  • Persona creation
  • Journey-map creation
  • Project management
  • Prototyping
  • User research
  • Visual design
  • Wireframes

Over the years, many winning intranet teams have engaged external resources to help in their redesign projects, both to fill internal-team gaps and gain outside experience and perspective.

Reliance on outside resources is a double-edged sword, however. Many winning organizations have quick development times and iterative processes, which raises a crucial question: When these short-term external resources are no longer on contract, who is left to iterate, maintain, and continually improve the new site?

Unifying the Organization Is a Key Intranet Goal

"If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself." – Henry Ford

The greatest theme this year was to build a platform that included all teams, individuals, and tools. Intranet teams and the organizations they support realize the value of inclusiveness, collaboration, and consolidation.

Whether the organization comprises a few small teams or several large businesses, an intranet — more than any other digital tool — can bond teams and companies within the organization. Seeing each group’s information and apps in the same menu, search results, and homepage can teach or remind employees about each team’s strengths and resources, so they may work together in the futures. Likewise, having access to the same overarching news, leaders’ messages, rich employee-profile documents, and policies can be unifying.

The organization leaders, by supporting and funding the intranet, demonstrate to all employees that they believe that the many people and parts that comprise the organization are ultimately meant to operate as a cohesive unit.

All of this year’s winners set goals for their designs before they started the project. Some had several, far-reaching goals, and almost every winner’s goal included something related to community, accessing or combining knowledge. Parts of the goals are listed below, with the common themes in bold: 

  • Angelini Group: develop a unique and inclusive group identity, overcome organizational divisions and integrate the faraway countries, increase sharing and collaboration on projects and cross-functional processes, and stimulate innovation and digital culture within employees
  • Barclays: organize hundreds of tools and division-specific microsites in one place
  • Con Edison: unify Con Edison and O & R employees on a single intranet platform
  • Dynacare: facilitate improved collaboration and productivity, provide employees with the ability to search for and find colleagues with expertise in different areas, provide a single point of access for all systems
  • Husky Energy: enable two-way communication with employees to create a more informed and collaborative workplace culture, provide a reliable, single source of information for employees that is mobile accessible; provide a consistent experience for all end users to access corporate or regional information and services
  • Korn Ferry: bring together staff and teams under one digital roof; provide one platform to effectively communicate, collaborate and manage knowledge across the entire organization; ensure the right people have the right knowledge at the right time
  • Loblaw: build a sense of community amongst all colleagues, regardless of location or role; expand the reach of the intranet beyond existing users to include more than 140,000 frontline colleagues
  • United Nations: “Uniting the United Nations”, bring diverse people together
  • Wellcome Trust: give users a sense of community; a clear picture of Wellcome, how it fits together and how they are achieving their vision; be connected to colleagues, feel valued, appreciated and heard

Goal-Driven Projects

To make a great intranet, members of the development team must work together as a strong unit. The goals they set were instrumental in the teams’ ability to work together effectively and efficiently. 

Vision: Derive, Agree, Socialize, Remind, and Strive

Whether the intranet’s vision is related to unifying the individuals and teams at an organization or related to totally different areas, written goals for intranets are like the net in a hockey game: all team members know what they are shooting for and work together to get there.

To derive goals, teams generally employed several steps:

  1. with key stakeholders, generate achievable goals
  2. state the goals and agree upon them
  3. share the goals with the entire team
  4. remind the team about the goals at key points in the development process

Without goals, team members prioritize work based on individual assumptions about goals. These assumptions may be completely different than those of the stakeholders or other team members. Even experienced, well-intended developers and content creators may go off the rails at times if they have no clear goals. Lack of common goals results in an intranet design that’s not cohesive.

A special challenge in intranet development is that team members often don’t work full time on the intranet. So, when they return to working on it after time away on other projects, they should be reminded of what they are striving for. Goals are extremely important in these cases.

Winning intranet team leaders create, share, and remind teams of the goals frequently.

Goals Can Be About Anything, But Are Manageable

An intranet’s goals should cover what the team wants to do, but not be overly ambitious or complicated. Winning teams kept their goals understandable and concise. The stated goals made it easy for teams to undertake their work, even though actually achieving them, of course, may have been a herculean effort.

The number of goals and their content varied to suit the organization’s needs. Some of the areas the goals covered include:

  • Features: Multiple organizations listed actual features as part of their intranet design goals. For example, Con Edison’s goals included: enhanced search capabilities, a standardized look-and- feel, consistent department templates, redesigned employee communications, and digital forms, policies, and procedures. Likewise, Husky Energy also called for “robust search function that delivered current and accurate data.” Barclays listed personalization and customization in its goals.
  • Efficiencies: The Bank Spółdzielczy we Wschowie team wanted to “streamline business processes” on the intranet, Angelini Group wanted to “increase sharing and collaboration on projects and cross-functional processes” and stimulate “innovation and digital culture” among employees. Dynacare worked to improve collaboration and productivity, while Korn Ferry looked to “increase efficiencies across key processes and the dissemination of knowledge across business.”
  • Systems and Devices: Some organizations included mobile devices and legacy systems they wanted their design to support. For example, Barclays’ list included making the “desktop and mobile applications work with selected legacy, current, and new technology, including: iOS, Android, Chrome, and IE.” Loblaw wanted the site to be designed in a “mobile-friendly manner”; and Husky Energy called for “mobile accessible”.
  • Communication: Dynacare wanted to enable “employees to communicate and collaborate more easily with colleagues.” Husky Energy strove for “two-way communication with employees to create a more informed and collaborative workplace culture.” 
  • Content: Korn Ferry’s goals mention creating a “clear classifications and ownership of content,” and Loblaw’s goals included “providing relevant content to colleagues.” Husky Energy wanted to “enable administrators and end users to publish and manage information efficiently.”
  • Accessibility: Barclays and Husky Energy set goals related to accessibility.

Outward Thinking Inside the Organization

Employees are often so focused on their own work and team that they are woefully unaware of what other groups at the organization do. Without knowledge about the rest of the organization, groups can be too provincial, miss opportunities to collaborate, hire external consultants when expertise exists in-house, and may even miss out on new career paths. This years’ winning intranet teams understood the importance of providing information about the various business units and teams. For example, the Husky Energy intranet offered sections about the different teams at the organization, so employees could learn about each team’s strategy, leadership, news, and performance. Dynacare’s ‘Who Does What’ page helped employees understand the business structure and offered details related to cross-functional departments.

Center of the Digital Workplace

Like last year, this year’s winning teams took responsibility for taking an inventory of the many tools in the organization’s digital workplace and making it possible to find and access them on the intranet.

A Tools menu, launching point, or other means to access various applications was present in most of the winning designs. Bank Spółdzielczy we Wschowie supported countless applications, from banking to HR. Barclays’ section for tools and links acted as a gateway for various tools and third-party sites. Angelini Group’s intranet integrated ticketing and workflow systems for vacation and order requests. On the Dynacare intranet, each application or digital workplace tool was contained in a card with a corresponding icon. Loblaw’s intranet enabled employees to access tools targeted to them via icons in a toolbar.

Enabling Connections

Building personal connections at work results in happy employees, each with a network of colleagues they can lean on when needed. Winning designs promoted these connections. For example, Loblaw displayed a Yammer feed to cultivate relationships between coworkers, while Barclays offered three types of collaboration tools on the intranet. Angelini Group put care into sharing the organization’s pride in its work. To promote success stories of the 100-year-old company, an ‘Angelini 100’ page called for employees from around the world to share their celebration stories. Husky Energy highlighted work anniversaries and awards.

Content-Management Advancements

Understanding that the content is the most critical part of any intranet, designers went beyond the typical and tried different strategies to audit, create, maintain, and govern the intranet’s content.

When deriving the intranet’s IA, Angelini Group conducted a comprehensive content inventory that encapsulated not just assets contained on the old intranet, but also other corporate tools whose content could be integrated into the new digital workplace.

Dynacare’s special Edit menu (available only to content administrators) made simple edits faster and easier through the option to edit content on any page of the intranet directly from the front end, instead of through the content-management system.

On every intranet page, Husky Energy’s page footer included a link to contact the news editor and another link to encourage employees to provide input on articles, pages, or the site in general.

Wellcome Trust encouraged and expected employees to share content on the intranet; thus, 40% of employees posted an article in 2018.

To ensure successful content and content maintenance, Con Edison engaged in content assessment, user research, as well as weekly planning and training meetings. It also put in place a clear governance model for department content managers and authors.

Giving authors credit for content and making their contact information available keeps content fresh. Husky Energy’s intranet displayed the name of the person who posted the page, along with a photo. This practice not only gives authors credit and a sense of page ownership, but it also helps colleagues determine the right person to go to if they have a question or comment.

Conclusion

Clear goals, effectively employing Agile development, self-awareness of the intranet teams’ strengths and weaknesses, and a holistic view of the organization and its digital workplace to inform the intranet design were a few of reasons why this years’ winners derived such remarkable designs. They make us proud to include them in our 20th anniversary report.