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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.

  • Field Studies Should Inform Intranet Redesign

    Observing users in their natural work context unveils mismatches between users’ and designers’ mental models and builds empathy with end users.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2018

    The winners of our 17th Intranet Design Annual came from diverse industries and relied on a combination of internal resources and external intranet help.

  • Bad Icons: How to Identify and Improve Them

    Related links are often chunked as a set, each with an icon. One bad icon hurts user interaction. A set of bad icons is worse because it amplifies confusion, adds clutter, and wastes screen real estate.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2017

    The winners of our 16th Intranet Design Annual came from diverse industries and relied on a combination of internal resources and external intranet help.

  • The Top Enduring Intranet-Design Mistakes: 7 Deadly Sins

    Intranet tools and programs come and go, but bad UIs linger for years, impact employee productivity and morale, and ultimately increase organizational costs.

  • 6 Tips for Successful Personalization

    Well-designed personalization carefully considers the creation of roles or types, ensures content is available for roles, and retains user control over the experience.

  • Customization vs. Personalization in the User Experience

    Customization gives control to the user and personalization gives control to the site. Both can enhance experiences, but only when carefully implemented.

  • Top 10 Intranet Trends of 2016

    Hero images, carousels, fat footers, video, minimalist design, and responsive navigation, are among some of the top feature trends of the best intranets of 2016. We even see a revival of online help that’s actually helpful to employees exploring new features or attempting complex tasks.

  • 3 Ways to Inspire Intranet Content Authors

    Organizational, group and individual support for content creators is necessary to encourage and create strong intranet content.

  • Design a Brilliant SharePoint Intranet

    SharePoint requires install plus in-depth UX design and development. Forge strong relationship with SharePoint UX designers and developers for successful intranets. And take advice from winning teams who have made SharePoint an effective enterprise tool.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2016

    The winners of our 15th Intranet Design Annual impress us with their design prowess, content support, UX research, responsive design, modern visuals, and SharePoint pushed to its limits.

  • 6 Ways to Encourage Social Participation on Intranets

    Promote employee contributions by setting examples, creating enticing topics of conversation, keeping a light tone of voice, and providing positive feedback.

  • Should Small Companies Have an Intranet?

    An intranet can benefit small organizations if they have many remote employees, a high employee turnover, and low findability of company-related content.

  • Content Migration Alone Is Not An Effective Content Strategy

    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.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2015

    Intranet teams continue to grow, streamline processes, and produce innovative designs. Some feature trends include: responsive design, search filters, flat design, and megamenus.

  • User Involvement for User Adoption: An Intranet Strategy

    Involving employees early and often in intranet design projects can not only improve usability, but also encourage user adoption.

  • Quicklinks: Bad Label or Indicative of Usability Issues

    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.

  • Intranet Portals are the Hub of the Enterprise Universe

    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.

  • Bad Intranet Navigation Labels: 3 Workarounds

    Many intranets are saddled with poorly understood labels. If you can't change them, add context to make these labels more transparent to users.

  • Responsive Design and Intranets and Importance of Content Prioritization

    Two winning intranets—triptic and Abt Associates—use responsive design, prioritize their content, and employ elegant navigation to accommodate and optimize for multiple devices.