Ever since intranets first emerged, there have been patched-together solutions that compete with them. Recognizing that siloed team spaces can be a huge problem for intranets, today’s best intranet designs make it possible for disparate groups to create their own pages as part of the organization’s official intranet and part of its taxonomy, tagging and search, according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen whose user-experience research firm Nielsen Norman Group today announced the winners of its 18th Intranet Design Annual contest. This year’s winning intranet design teams and their intranets are featured in detail in Nielsen Norman Group’s 463-page report Intranet Design Annual 2018: The Year’s 10 Best Intranets, which is now available to download on the company’s website.

“To be useful, intranet content should be centrally managed and accessible via global navigation and search. To bring together siloed spaces, this year’s winning intranets made it incredibly simple for teams to create their own brand-compliant, design-consistent pages within the main intranet without needing any technical skills or web expertise,” said Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group, “Not only does this offer great benefits to all employees in terms of ensuring fresh content and help in finding what they need, but having teams create their own pages can help save on agency costs.”

Applying this and other winning design strategies are the world’s 10 best intranets for 2018 (in alphabetical order):

  • American Medical Association (US), a national organization providing resources for physicians, residents, and medical students
  • Archer Malmo (US), one of the largest independently owned full-service advertising agencies in the United States
  • Capital Power (Canada), a North American power producer
  • Delta Air Lines (US), one of the world’s largest global airlines
  • eBay, Inc. (US), a multinational commerce company operating through its Marketplace, StubHub, and Classifieds platforms to connect millions of sellers with more than 169 million active buyers around the world
  • GSK (UK), a science-led company that researches, develops, and manufactures innovative pharmaceutical medicines, vaccines, and consumer healthcare products
  • Maple Leaf Foods Inc. (Canada), a food manufacturer
  • PKP Energetyka S.A. (Poland), an energy company
  • The Travelers Companies, Inc. (US) a leading provider of property casualty insurance for auto, home and business
  • UN World Food Programme (Italy), a leading humanitarian organization fighting hunger and working toward the global goal of ending hunger by 2030

Seven of the 10 winners are headquartered in North America with five from the US and two from Canada, plus one each from the UK, Poland and Italy. The median company size of this year’s winners was 13,000 employees, with four of the winning organizations supporting 1,000 or fewer employees.

Some other trends covered in this year’s NN/g Intranet Design Annual include:

Simplification of Design

This year’s greatest featuring-influencing trend was the simplification of intranet design. The best intranet teams today have less to prove and more to gain by focusing on foundational design elements such as IA, content and page structure rather than on the latest user interface.

Mobile-second

Even though organizations know that mobile is important to their employees, this year’s best intranets took a realistic, practical approach to mobile design, as was required from working within very real resource constraints. Many took an incremental approach, in some cases offering only the top tasks on mobile instead of offering everything that is on the intranet.

Employee Photos

In a big departure from the past, almost all of the winning designs were peppered with photos of real employees at work, instead of the traditionally used stock-art images. Organizations are very aware of user privacy, but they also recognize the value of employees seeing themselves, teammates and coworkers doing their jobs. It builds a natural camaraderie.

Nielsen Norman Group's Intranet Design Annual 2018: The Year’s 10 Best Intranets, co-authored by Kara Pernice, Amy Schade and Patty Caya is available to download for $248 from the Nielsen Norman Group website at http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet-design-annual/.

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.