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Nielsen Norman Group Announces The World's 10 Best Intranets and Reveals Advancements in Personalization and Mobile StrategiesIntranet personalization and mobile strategies that aim to deliver the right content to the right person and on the right device sometimes have the unintended consequence of making employees feeling handcuffed. Many of this year's winning intranets successfully tackled this problem by making it possible for employees to access content other than what is usually funneled to them and to access their company's Intranet on any device they want, according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen whose user-experience research firm Nielsen Norman Group today announced the winners of its 15th annual Intranet Design contest. This year's winning teams and their intranets are featured in detail in Nielsen Norman Group's new 374-page report "Intranet Design Annual 2015: The Year's 10 Best Intranets." "Generally speaking, intranet personalization serves the very useful purpose of pushing employees the information they need according to their job and location and hiding the information they don't need. Less noise. But, that's not always a good thing," said Jakob Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group. "Maybe the manager based in Italy wants to view information served to the people she manages in Germany. Several of our winning intranets developed advanced personalization capabilities that allow people to view content that is not part of their default role." In another effort to give employees better access to the content they need when they need it, a number of the winning intranets focused on allowing employees to view the company intranet on any device they want, rather than designing an app for only one or a few particular devices. This required intranet teams to really prioritize content in order to offer the most appropriate features and information by default on displays both large and small, and either tappable or clickable. Demonstrating these advanced personalization and mobile strategies, the 2015 world's 10 best intranets - in alphabetical order - are:
Other trends to emerge from this year's intranet design contest include: Social Goes to the Next Level - Once excluded from intranets, social tools are now pervasive throughout each of this year's winning intranets. In addition to the usual features (e.g. rate, like and recommended), several organizations added tools - birthday and anniversary calendars, for example - that encourage employees to make casual and work-related connections. Search Filters - Search is a powerful feature that helps people locate the information they need to do their jobs. But for many years, intranet search capabilities have been sorely lacking. This year's winners have made great strides with tagging content and using faceted search to help employees be more productive by finding the right resources. With Content, Less is More - Intranet teams are improving the way content is published and maintained. The focus is now on streamlining content, publishing it once and judiciously spreading that same content throughout the intranet, resulting in reduced re-work and fewer errors. "Intranets have come a long way in the 15 years since we started evaluating them. It used to take years for teams to launch one huge, 'full' intranet. Today, the trend is to use an iterative process that allows teams regularly to add new functional elements and more importantly, to innovate, which is in abundant evidence with this year's group of winners," said Kara Pernice, Nielsen Norman Group managing director.
Nielsen Norman Group's "Intranet Design Annual 2015: The Year's 10 Best
Intranets," co-authored by Kara Pernice, Amy Schade, Patty Caya and
Jakob Nielsen is available to download for $248 from the Nielsen Norman
Group website at About Nielsen Norman Group Nielsen Norman Group (http://www.nngroup.com) in an evidence-based user experience research, training and consulting firm that advises companies on how to improve the bottom line through human-centered design of products and services. NN/g principals Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman and Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini are world-renowned user experience experts who were advocating human-centered design and usability long before it became popular to do so. Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Silicon Valley, NN/g evaluates interfaces of all kinds and guides the critical design decisions that make websites, applications, intranets and products achieve their full potential for businesses and their users.
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