Intranets Articles & Videos

  • Johnson & Johnson’s Intranet Consolidation and Roadmap

    Johnson & Johnson’s redesigned intranet centralizes company news and digital-workplace tools on a single platform. Its intranet roadmap focused on problems to solve to improve productivity and boost the intranet’s perception.

  • Context Adds Value to UX Artifacts

    In a museum, knowing the backstory of an artifact makes it more interesting. Similarly, in a UX project, you can make better decisions when you know the context of your UX artifacts like journey maps and wireframes.

  • Enterprise User Experience

    Trends for improving the user experience for enterprise software and other internal design projects.

  • 9 Ways to Encourage Employee Sharing and Engagement on an Intranet

    Keysight Technologies uses features such as comments, executive question-and-answer forums, and monthly photo contests to encourage employee-generated content and sharing on the intranet.

  • ConocoPhillips’s Improved Intranet Content-Management Process

    ConocoPhillips included publishers in its intranet redesign to improve content processes and offer new tools to create high-quality information for employees.

  • Structuring Intranet Discovery & Design Research

    Commonwealth Care Alliance began its intranet redesign with discovery research that continued into detailed design and development. Involving employees early generated excitement and contributed to the new intranet’s success.

  • Remarkable Organizations and Challenges, Fast Development, and Small Teams Define the 2021 Intranet Design Annual Winners

    Winning intranets were created quickly; and all winners welcomed expertise and assistance from outside agencies.

  • How Wellcome Trust Developed an Award-Winning Intranet

    Wellcome Trust’s winning intranet, Trustnet, is the product of a user-centered design, a clear product vision, in-house development capabilities, and Agile development.

  • Intranet Design Annual Winner Preview: The UN Intranet-iSeek

    The United Nations’ intranet, The UN Intranet-iSeek, consolidated many separate intranets to align and connect employees as they carry out their important work.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2021: What Makes Them Great

    The 2021 Intranet Design Annual winning teams exhibited a capacity to swiftly pivot, as well as compassion and empathy for employees.

  • Intranet Vision

    A clear vision gives the team something to aim for, and this is especially important for intranet projects, which often involve contributors from many different departments or functions.

  • Opening Links in New Browser Windows and Tabs

    Carefully examine the user’s context, task at hand, and next steps when deciding whether to open links to documents and external sites in the same or a new browser tab.

  • How to Organize COVID-19 Information on Your Intranet

    Interviews with intranet designers and case-study analyses show that designers are positioning COVID-19 content on intranets all in one place and are making it easy to find and consume.

  • User-Centered Intranet Redesign: Set Up for Success in 11 Steps

    Before designing an intranet, appoint a leader, align with stakeholders, get user feedback, derive an intranet vision, create user-related artifacts, and assemble the right team.

  • COVID-19 Content on Your Intranet

    Interviews with intranet designers show that intranets are responding to COVID-19 with frequent updates, information about staying healthy, and tools to aid virtual work.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2020

    Overview of the year's 10 award-winning intranet designs, including better search, connecting employees, team information, and content management.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2020: What Makes Them Great

    Clear vision, Agile development, and the goal to connect coworkers are what distinguishes the best intranets.

  • What Every Intranet Needs: Reflections After 20 Years of the Intranet Design Annual

    Communication, credibility, collaboration, consistency, and a central place that organizes policies, forms, and all the tools offered in the digital workplace are some of the marks of successful intranets.

  • Content Management on Intranets: Centralized, Distributed, and Hybrid Models

    Three different content-management models enforce who creates, owns, and publishes intranet content.

  • Tool Abundance in the Digital Workplace: Trendy or Troublesome?

    With an abundance of digital workplace tools available today, organizations must carefully approach tool curation to preserve employee productivity and their workplace experience.

  • Context Adds Value to UX Artifacts

    In a museum, knowing the backstory of an artifact makes it more interesting. Similarly, in a UX project, you can make better decisions when you know the context of your UX artifacts like journey maps and wireframes.

  • Enterprise User Experience

    Trends for improving the user experience for enterprise software and other internal design projects.

  • Intranet Vision

    A clear vision gives the team something to aim for, and this is especially important for intranet projects, which often involve contributors from many different departments or functions.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2020

    Overview of the year's 10 award-winning intranet designs, including better search, connecting employees, team information, and content management.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2019

    The winners of the Intranet Design Annual award improve digital workplace support through better (often federated) search, surfacing data, and actionable visual design as well as easier access to key apps and business tools.

  • 10 Things Executives Should Know About Intranets

    A good intranet increases productivity and can be an excellent motivational tool. Intranets are vital to an organization's success and requires executive support. Learn what management can do to support better intranets.

  • Persuasive Techniques for B2B and Intranets

    Tips for simplifying decision-making and engagement on B2B and intranet sites.

  • Industries Impacted Most by UX (Jakob Nielsen)

    Industries such as technology and e-commerce have reaped the rewards of good UX. Other sectors such as B2B and Intranets are following suit.

  • Best Intranet Design Trends of 2018

    This year's intranet design winners focus on simplified designs, large headline text, and links to social sites.

  • Intranet Information Architecture (IA) Trends

    Intranets are improving findability and discoverability by organizing content by task, using mega-menus, offering wayfinding cues, and providing shortcuts.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2014

    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.

  • Suggested-Employee Search—The Best Intranet Design Today—Could Save Your Organization Half a Million Dollars

    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.

  • Mobile Intranet Design

    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.

  • Intranet Social Features

    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.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2013

    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.

  • Intranet Users Stuck at Low Productivity

    Although intranet design is improving, it hasn't kept pace with increased complexity in enterprise requirements, so measured usability is down slightly.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2012

    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.

  • Intranet Portals: Personalization Hot, Mobile Weak, Governance Essential

    19 new case studies of enterprise portals find slow growth in new features; the focus is on robust integration and formalizing governance.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2011

    Knowledge management progressed from cliché to reality, based on simpler and thus more-used features. Mobile intranets doubled.

  • Does SharePoint Destroy Intranet Design?

    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.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2010

    Intranet design is maturing and reaping the rewards of continuous quality improvement for traditional features, while embracing new trends like mobile access, emergency preparedness, and user/employee-contributed content.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2009

    Intranets are getting more strategic, with increased collaboration support. Team size is growing by 12% per year, and platforms are becoming integrated, with a strong showing for SharePoint.

  • Enterprise Portals Are Popping

    A usability analysis of 23 intranet portals finds strong growth, increasing collaboration features, and cross-functional governance.

  • Link List Color on Intranets

    Lists of links are an intermediate case between content-embedded links and menu items. Showing listed links in blue or in the site's main link color is the recommended design - and the one most intranets follow.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2008

    Consistent design and integrated IA are becoming standard on good intranets. This year's winners focused on productivity tools, employee self-service, access to knowledgeable people (as opposed to 'knowledge management'), and better-presented company news.

  • Intranet Information Architecture (IA) Methods

    In analyzing 56 intranets, we found many common top-level categories, labels, and navigation designs, but ultimately, the diversity was too great to recommend a single IA.

  • Intranet Usability Shows Huge Advances

    Measured usability improved by 44% compared to our last large-scale intranet study. The new research identified 5 times the previous number of intranet design guidelines.

  • 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.