Jakob Nielsen Dishes Up The Best Intranets 2008

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Jan 14, 2008

Jakob Nielsen has released his latest Intranet Design Annual. In it he lists the 10 best Intranets for 2008, discussing why they won. While the winners are interesting to know, what’s even more important are the reasons why they won – offering best practices and guidance to companies who want to make their own Intranet better.

According to the reports findings, there are seven important considerations to establishing a good intranet:

Integrating Company News

It’s time to take company news more seriously on the intranet. It’s getting much more homepage real estate. Companies are investing significant resources to create, edit and maintain company news.Development of news using multimedia has grown to a new high this year.

Some companies are finding ways to mix corporate news with regional/departmental news directly on the homepage.

Some Key Features are Old Favorites

The report finds that some of the key features in the winning intranets are actually old favorites. The twist? They are more polished and the focus on the user experience is driving the quality of the tools higher.

Some favorites include:

Employee Directory – companies are going beyond the basics to deliver enhanced employee directories that help employees find people
Single Sign On (SSO) – still a strong determinant of employee satisfaction, employees find they are more productive when they don’t have to log in to multiple applications
Integration– one of the keys to a quality intranet is a single Information Architecture (IA) with consistent navigation and user experience
CMS - special interfaces for improved usability for authors and publishers
Updated content – keeping content fresh is a critical component to a successful quality intranet

Focusing on Productivity and Knowledge Management

The best intranets focus on providing tools for employees that make them more productive in their everyday work lives. To do this, sometimes the smaller tools are the trick (like simple online forms). It’s not necessary to always spend time on creating advanced applications. The key is to consider what employees need to do their jobs and introduce tools to help them do it better or faster.

As for Knowledge Management – it’s a key goal with a new approach. It’s about recognizing that “knowledge resides with people”. There’s renewed design focus on improving access to the people with the knowledge.

Intranet Design Trends

Lots of interesting trends were found:

Increased personalization and integration of alert functionality
Emphasis on mission critical apps and information
Integration of external and internal company news
Improved or redesigned search features
Improved calendars for events and projects
New employee orientation sections
Prominent display of company financial information, including stock quotes

Easing up on the Branding

There are now three types of Intranet branding used. The focus is not as much on branding the intranet with a unique name as it on either not branding it all (calling it “the intranet”) or branding it with the company brand name (not a strong brand in itself).