Jakob Nielsen – Intranet Usability

Intranet Usability: Design Guidelines from Studies with Intranet Users

Summary

While website designers can look to the Web for good examples, intranet designers are limited to their own imaginations, or maybe out-of-the-box intranet development tools, for inspiration. The gloomy fact is intranet designers have no role models. It is amazing, however, the similarities in design and content between the intranets we have studied. What’s equally amazing are the great differences that occur when there are no public intranet examples to influence the design, and how an organization’s culture influences the intranet design.

This report helps intranet designers improve the usability of their designs by giving them the results of usability testing of 14 different intranets: 10 in different cities in the U.S.; three in London, England; and one in Hong Kong, China.

This report shows what happened when real employees used a broad set of real intranets to: find information about another employee or department, find specific information such as a fax number, research a company policy, enter an expense report, find a training course and sign up for it, retrieve forms, and many other tasks.

We report task times for each of 16 common employee tasks. These statistics allow you to estimate the ROI for a redesign project because you can compare your own intranet with the distribution of measured productivity across other intranets.

The 111 design guidelines in the report are based on usability tests of the following intranets:

• Allen and Gerritsen, Watertown, MA, USA
  strategic marketing company with 100 full-time employees
• Amazon.com, Seattle, WA, USA
  online retailer with 7,500 employees;
  note that we studied the intranet and not the company’s famous e-commerce site
• American Airlines, Fort Worth, TX, USA
  airline, more than 122,000 employees
• Cathay Pacific, Lantau, Hong Kong
  airline with 14,000 employees
• CIT Group Inc., Livingston, NJ, USA
  financial services company with 7,000 employees
• Consumers’ Association, London, U.K.
  charity, publishes Which? magazine among other activities
• Currie & Brown (U.K.), London, U.K.
  specializing in construction costs and risk and project management
• Kulicke & Soffa Industries, Inc., Willow Grove, PA, USA
  the world’s largest supplier of semiconductor assembly equipment
• Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, MA, USA
  biopharmaceutical R&D focused on biotherapeutic and predictive medicine products, with approximately 2,200 employees and contractors using the intranet
• San Juan Unified School District, Sacramento, CA, USA
  public school district with 5,000 employees
• Shell UK (IT Intranet), study done in London, U.K.
  big multi-national energy company (tested divisional intranet for the IT division, which is headquartered in Houston, TX, USA)
• State of California Employment Development Department, Sacramento, CA, USA
  state department with 7,000 employees
• Vytra Health Plans, Melville, NY, USA
  managed health care organization which employs 450 people
• Wildcard Systems, Inc., Maitland, FL, USA
  financial services company that develops stored value cards for electronic payment and employs 200 people

Richly illustrated with 164 screenshots of intranet screens that worked well or caused problems in user testing.

Table of Contents

231-page report

1. Executive Summary
2. Overview
3. Intranets Studied
4. Success and Satisfaction
5. Cost-Benefit Analysis: ROI for Investments in Intranet Usability
6. Guidelines
7. Access, Address, Login, and Password
   • 12 design guidelines
8. Personalization, for People and Groups
   • 2 design guidelines
9. Content and Updating Content
   • Components Present on Intranets Studied
   • 6 design guidelines
10. Navigation and Terminology
    • 17 design guidelines
11. Text
    • 4 design guidelines
12. Search
    • 8 design guidelines
13. Information about Individuals and Groups, and Org Charts
    • 13 design guidelines
14. News
    • 4 design guidelines
15. Corporate Information, Policies, and Procedures
    • 5 design guidelines
16. Job Postings
    • 6 design guidelines
17. Human Resources
    • 2 design guidelines
18. General Forms, Time Sheets, and Expense Reports
    • 7 design guidelines
19. Training
    • 2 design guidelines
20. Technology Help Desk
    • 3 design guidelines
21. Homepage
    • 4 design guidelines
22. International
    • 5 design guidelines
23. Management and Organizations
    • Killer Apps
    • The Anti Killer App
    • 12 process guidelines
24. Participants
25. Tasks
26. Methodology
27. Tips for Conducting Usability Evaluations in Intranets
28. Facilitation Documents

What You Get

• Checklist of 111 specific recommendations: review your intranet for these 111 best practices, and you will discover several things that need improvement.
  • The average intranet violates more than half of our usability guidelines. You might have the one perfect intranet in the world that does everything right, but the odds are against you. It is safest to score your designs against a checklist of usability guidelines to make sure you don’t do anything wrong.
  • A company with 10,000 employees that currently has average intranet usability can gain $5 million in productivity per year by increasing usability to the best quartile of intranets in our study.
• Description of how employees behave when navigating, searching, and reading intranets.
• 164 screenshots of intranet design elements with analysis of why they worked well or poorly in user testing.
• $350,000 of user research at 0.07% of the cost.
• Vendor-independent analysis. Other companies that charge much higher prices for their reports receive large amounts of money from vendors. In contrast, we are independent of any vendors of intranet software and solutions. We are not trying to sell you design services, so we don’t have to push any particular approach. (We do offer usability evaluations, but this service also depends on being independent of design firms and technology providers.)
• Knowledge to make your intranet a positive force for productivity in your company. The return on investment for intranet usability is often a factor of 10 or more, as further analyzed in the ROI chapter of the report.

Who Should Read This Report?

• Anybody who is responsible for the design, implementation, or strategy of intranets.
• The CIO (at least give him/her the executive summary and the ROI chapter).

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