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231 pages PDF format
Download Report (from eSellerate)
$248 for a single report, $468 for the report and the right to make copies within your organization and place on your intranet.
(No shipping/handling fees will be added: it's an immediate download.)
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Summary
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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.
> sample chapter as thumbnail image
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.
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Table of Contents
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231-page report
- Executive Summary
- Overview
- Intranets Studied
- Success and Satisfaction
- Cost-Benefit Analysis: ROI for Investments in Intranet Usability
- Guidelines
- Access, Address, Login, and Password
- Personalization, for People and Groups
- Content and Updating Content
- Components Present on Intranets Studied
- 6 design guidelines
- Navigation and Terminology
- Text
- Search
- Information about Individuals and Groups, and Org Charts
- News
- Corporate Information, Policies, and Procedures
- Job Postings
- Human Resources
- General Forms, Time Sheets, and Expense Reports
- Training
- Technology Help Desk
- Homepage
- International
- Management and Organizations
- Killer Apps
- The Anti Killer App
- 12 process guidelines
- Participants
- Tasks
- Methodology
- Tips for Conducting Usability Evaluations in Intranets
- Facilitation Documents
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What You Get
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- 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.
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Who Should Read This Report?
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- 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).
Running a similar usability study yourself to collect comparative design lessons from a large number of intranets would cost about $350,000, if you could ever get enough companies to let you in the door. Realistically, reading this report is the only way you will find out how users actually use a wide range of intranet design alternatives.
Please help us continue publishing low-price reports by buying a site license if you have colleagues who will read the report. If you only need it for yourself, then that's obviously what the single-user license is for. If somebody "gives" you a copy, then please buy a download anyway to keep prices down in the future.
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Download Report (from eSellerate)
$248 for the PDF file (231 pages) $468 for site license that allows you make multiple copies within your organization and place on your intranet |
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Related Reports |
Intranet Portals: Report from the Trenches Intranet design annuals present case studies of intranet designs with great usability to allow intranet designers to learn from each other.
> 2006 design annual
> 2005 design annual
> 2003 design annual
> 2002 design annual
> 2001 design annual
Each year's annual presents 10 completely different case studies.
10 Best Government Intranets
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Alternative Payments |
If you do not want to buy online, we accept other forms of payment:
- Check
- Bank transfer
- Purchase orders
- Faxed or mailed credit cards
We can also send you a paper invoice if your company requires that.
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Press Coverage
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News.com:
Shoddy search prevents worker success
IT Director:
Don't be too clever, says web guru
Personal Computer World:
Intranets are 'information dumping grounds'
Intranet Professional:
Critical Issues in Intranet Design
The Globe and Mail:
Take a second look at your corporate intranet
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Download Time |
The PDF document is a big file because of the many screenshots (10 MB). Downloads will take about this much time:
> Modem: 35 minutes
> Broadband: 2-3 minutes
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File Format |
The report is a standard PDF file, formatted to print on both 8.5x11 and A4 paper. Any recent version of the Acrobat Reader will suffice to read or print the file. No special software is needed. The file is not copy-protected: we trust you to buy a site license if you are going to have several people read the report.
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Tutorial |
Full-day tutorial on intranet usability.
> in-house class for your intranet team (presented at your company)
> public tutorial at the User Experience 2006 conference (Seattle and London)
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