Promote employee contributions by setting examples, creating enticing topics of conversation, keeping a light tone of voice, and providing positive feedback.
An intranet can benefit small organizations if they have many remote employees, a high employee turnover, and low findability of company-related content.
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.
Intranet teams continue to grow, streamline processes, and produce innovative designs. Some feature trends include: responsive design, search filters, flat design, and megamenus.
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.
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.
Two winning intranets—triptic and Abt Associates—use responsive design, prioritize their content, and employ elegant navigation to accommodate and optimize for multiple devices.
Intranets are improving findability and discoverability by organizing content by task, using mega-menus, offering wayfinding cues, and providing shortcuts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Although intranet design is improving, it hasn't kept pace with increased complexity in enterprise requirements, so measured usability is down slightly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 included publishers in its intranet redesign to improve content processes and offer new tools to create high-quality information for employees.
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.
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.
The United Nations’ intranet, The UN Intranet-iSeek, consolidated many separate intranets to align and connect employees as they carry out their important work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With an abundance of digital workplace tools available today, organizations must carefully approach tool curation to preserve employee productivity and their workplace experience.
Striking trends from this years’ Intranet Design Annual include user-targeted search, core task support, launch fanfare, and integrated access to key tools.
Winners are from large and medium-sized organizations from around the world; they had short development time and small teams who relied on both internal resources and external help.
The name of the intranet, its logo, and the visual relationship with the company’s external website are key elements to consider when establishing a brand and an identity for your intranet.
