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Intranets Articles & Videos

  • 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.

  • Intranet Portals Get Streamlined

    An analysis of intranet portals found slimmer information architectures and a renewed emphasis on fresh content and useful applications. Past findings, including those on role-based personalization, were confirmed.

  • The Canonical Intranet Homepage

    Intranet homepages have become very similar in their basic layout. Intranets that look the same can nonetheless differ drastically in usability due to different features and content.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2005

    On average, this year's winning intranets increased site use by 149% with designs that supported bigger screens, multinational users, collaboration, easily updated content, and factory-floor workers.

  • Ten Best Government Intranets

    Redesigning an intranet for usability often more than doubled the use of these award-winning designs from ten public-sector organizations.

  • Ten Best Intranets of 2003

    This year's winning intranet designs emphasized workflow support, self-service content management, and offloading tasks from email to collaboration tools. On average, companies spent three years between redesigns, and one year on the redesign itself.

  • Employee Directory Search: Resolving Conflicting Usability Guidelines

    Guidelines conflict on whether to limit intranet search to a single search box or dedicate an additional box to employee directory searches. There's theory to support both guidelines. What's up?

  • Intranet Usability: The Trillion-Dollar Question

    The average mid-sized company could gain $5 million per year in employee productivity by improving its intranet design to the top quartile level of a cross-company intranet usability study. The return on investment? One thousand percent or more.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2002

    This year's winning intranet designs emphasized integrated support of international offices, long development times (two years on average), one-stop start-up screens and single sign-in, and usability testing of interfaces for content contributors.

  • The 10 Best Intranet Designs of 2001

    The best intranets of 2001 emphasize iterative design and standardized navigation, and feature collaboration tools and content management systems. On average, companies saw intranet use increase by 98% following their winning usability redesigns.

  • Intranet Portals: The Corporate Information Infrastructure

    An intranet should have a single home page that integrates a directory hierarchy, search, and news. Most intranets are chaotic, under-funded, and lack design standards, causing huge losses in employee productivity.

  • The Difference Between Intranet and Internet Design

    Your intranet should have different visual style and navigational architecture from your website since users, tasks, and information all differ. Intranets should be managed diversity; neither totalitarian nor anarchies.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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: 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.

  • 4 Noteworthy Intranet Design Trends in 2019

    Striking trends from this years’ Intranet Design Annual include user-targeted search, core task support, launch fanfare, and integrated access to key tools.

  • 10 Best Intranets of 2019

    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.

  • Branding an Intranet

    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.

  • Intranet Design After a Merger or Acquisition

    Building an intranet for a newly expanded organization calls for empathy, balance, and often some resistance toward upper management.