Intranet ux design

What is Intranet Design Annual? How to improve your own Intranet Design? Now what about your employees? Design a Brilliant SharePoint Intranet Summary: SharePoint requires install plus in-depth UX design and development.

Forge strong relationship with SharePoint UX designers and developers for successful intranets. And take advice from winning teams who have made SharePoint an effective enterprise tool. Project managers can talk directly with employees to understand needs and pain points, and that is already a great start to designing a useful intranet.

UX design is never finishe so plan on an evaluation process from the start. UX encompasses the end-to-end interaction of a user with your site – usability and function to interface design and brand. Yes, most intranets have a search field and return to user queries. But that’s a pretty low bar for defining a successful search functionality, and many intranets still don’t raise above it. In these cases, intranet search doesn’t turn up the most relevant content.

The ramifications of poor search range from employees wasting precious time in order to find what they need to their acting on inaccurate content. See full list on nngroup. Content in a silo (or walled-off content) is content that’s difficult to discover and find. The content may be walled off in multiple ways: 1. Common examples of content in silos include: 1. Often silos emerge because they are easier to create — both in terms of actual effort and of actual organizational politics and involvement — than content that is properly integrated within an overreaching information architecture and linked through the main intranet access points (such as search and navigation).

Intranet teams are quite often understaffe so having the expertise of a seasoned visual designer is merely a dream at many organizations. Additionally, politics and the stakeholders with the biggest checkbooks often dictate which page content appears bigger, higher, and brighter. Resulting designs often lack informed page-layout strategy, clear hierarchy, and visual appeal.

Elements that strongly contribute to visual layout can be related to: 1. Text: color, size, typeface, bold and normal, and space above and below text 2. Graphics and images: position, size, color, graphics’ relationship to content 3. Space: information density, white space, chunking When text, graphics, or space are not used properly, pages look cluttere with too much content, and no visual hierarchy. Scanning is difficult because links, headings and subheadings are not easily distinguishable from normal text. Users have trouble determining which page elements are relevant for them. And important announcement. Pretty, modern-looking text doesn’t have to be illegible.

But, small, light gray texton a white background is quite common, as are these related text-camouflaging practices: 1. Remember also that today’s intranets are used on a multitude of devices, many of them portable: glare due to sun light can make low-contrast text invisible. Banner blindness is almost as old as the Internet. Advertisers still persist in creating ads that do not match the style (color, font, graphical elements) of the websites they appear on, most likely because they do not know in advance on which site the ad will be shown. Our eyetracking researchshows that people look more at advertisements that match the style of the website. And they tune out elements that’s don’t appear to be part of the site’s core content.

It is, however, surprising that banner blindness is also alive and well on intranets. Groups such as HR and Corporate Communications, who want employees to see certain announcements, erroneously make internal promotions look like advertisements. Bright colors that are different from those used on the rest of the intranet, animations, and smiling stock-art people repel employees from these promotions, and cause them to miss things like Benefits Open Enrollment, All-Hands Meeting Friday at 3:00PM ET, and Blood Drive Next Week!

If intranet design issues were insects, disappearing navigation would be the cockroach that survives any asperities the world may send its way. Solving this problem is as difficult as fumigating an infested apartment complex. One of the main reasons is that content strategy and information architectureare sometimes only partially planned on intranets. Pages and subsites hang in the wind by just the thin thread of a crosslink.

When they click this crosslink, users enter a world that looks completely different from the rest of the intranet , and that is missing the much relied upon anchor that is the global navigation. Another common reason for eliminating global navigation on certain pages is the attempt to declutter the design and create an immersive experience. Progressive disclosure suggests hiding unnecessary elements in an interface until the user asks for them.

On mobile, designers sometimes collapse the navigation to effectively use the small screen real estate. A key benefit of many intranets is that they consolidate information that is peppered throughout an organization. But stopping at giving just a link is less helpful than offering some of the content the link leads to. For example, a section on an employee-benefits page may be called Employee stock options.

Additional information may sometimes come with the link — such as or Check funds. This is slightly better than the link alone, but it still contains no real content. Rather, it promises that content will appear on the next page.

Why not give the employees some information of value just after the link? For example, offer the current stock price, or the personalized options’ value for the current user. In another example, CEO Blog with a picture of the CEO is understandable, but also seeing a posts’ title, like The last US presidential election will affect our business this year would make employees want to go read the post.

How do these most-enduring intranet UX problems relate to the most-enduring design problems on public websites, which we identified in a research project earlier this year? Well, bad search and siloed content appear on both lists. Truly plagues of usability. But otherwise the two lists are different.

That sai intranets still sometimes commit some of the design mistakes that are more deadly for websites, so it’s worth paying attention to both lists. Survey your intranet for the most persistent and troublesome UX problems, and rejoice if your design avoids them. But if any of these intranet “sins” skulk, perform an exorcism by reviewing intranet usability guidelines, using updated personas, and doing iterative design and usability testing. Instead of making an educated guess about what employees might look for in an intranet platform, leaders can utilize user-centered design (UCD) to create the kind of experience end-users desire.

UCD is a collection of processes that put user preferences at the forefront throughout product design and development. THE INTRANET AND ITS EVOLUTION First of all let’s clarify what an Intranet is , and how the meaning of the term has changed over time. The Importance of a Good User Experience. Intranet UX Design Great intranet designs create unity, foster collaboration, and improve the culture. Understan create, and manage the experience employees have as they use your intranet portal to get things done.

People rely on intranet portals to work efficiently and find information quickly. Our intranet UX design helps make that happen by presenting intranet content in an intuitive, seamless manner to users. The project outputs were delivered in two parts.

First, a user research insights report covering all of the key findings was produced. Secon a UX compendium document including design ideas for intranet improvements, a revised intranet , and a series of page templates from which GSK could better structure their content. They’re typically more robust than your external website, serving multiple purposes and housing a variety of important company information, department items and team data.