Intranet Teams Larger Than Ever -- Nielsen Norman Group Announces the World’s 10 Best Intranets in 12th Annual Design Contest

FREMONT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Intranet team size as a percentage of company size is now more than double what it has been for the past three years and is at an all time high, according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen whose user-experience research firm Nielsen Norman Group today announced the winners of its 12th annual intranet design contest. In 2001, when Nielsen Norman conducted its first competition, the average intranet team size was 0.012% of company size. Today, the teams that designed and manage the world’s top 10 intranets represent on average 0.074% of company size, a striking six times what team sizes were in 2001. This year’s winning teams and their intranets are showcased in Nielsen Norman Group’s new 431-page report “Intranet Design Annual 2012: The Year’s 10 Best Intranets.”

“Intranet Design Annual 2012: The Year’s 10 Best Intranets”

“It’s quite encouraging to see team size growing at this pace, as it’s a clear indication that organizations are finally fully awake to the incredible value that intranets bring to their companies. Once considered a nice-to-have, intranets are now viewed as essential, not only from a productivity standpoint, but with the increase in intranet social networking and personalization, they also serve to strengthen a company’s culture,” said Jakob Nielsen, principal, Nielsen Norman Group.

This year’s winning intranets took social networking and personalization to new levels including in the following ways:

Lightening-fast access to co-worker information—There was a time when it was difficult even to find a way to search on an intranet for a co-worker’s name. Now, fly-out windows quickly display information about people as a name is being typed into the query box, and a wave of the mouse over organizational charts yields pop-ups that quickly display the person’s photo, team and other information.

Wall feeds integrated with employee profile page—While social networking exploded on intranets the last few years, feeds were not common until this year. The employee profile pages on some of the winning intranets now function similarly to Facebook profile pages where employees may post photos, update their status and comment on each other’s pages.

Cheering personal content (in addition to business content)—Companies seem to have finally recognized that employees are not just employees, but people with full lives and outside interests. Many of the winning intranets encourage employees to blog and write in the news feeds about both business and personal topics.

“One thing that took us by surprise this year was the utter stall in mobile efforts. Just last year, more than 60% of our winning intranets were focusing on specific features for employees on the go. This year, only one of our winners was developing anything mobile,” said Nielsen Norman Group director Amy Schade. “In spite of their larger size, our guess is that the winning intranet teams didn’t have the budget and resources needed to develop anything other than the main intranet site.”

The world's top intranets demonstrating this year’s design trends are described in detail in Nielsen Norman Group’s 431-page report entitled “Intranet Design Annual 2012: The Year’s 10 Best Intranets,” co-authored by Kara Pernice, Amy Schade, Patty Caya and Jakob Nielsen.

The 10 organizations with winning intranets are headquartered in four countries and have an average of 19,700 employees. In alphabetical order, the 2012 world's 10 best intranets are:

CenturyLink Business (United States), a telecommunications company
Everything Everywhere Limited (United Kingdom), a communications company
Genentech (US), a biotechnology company
LivePerson, Inc. (US), a communications company
Logica (UK) a business and technology service company
MAN Diesel & Turbo SE (Germany), provider of large-bore diesel engines and turbomachinery for marine and stationary applications
NCR Corporation (US), a technology company
The ScottsMiracle-Gro Company (US), a marketer of branded consumer products for lawn and garden care
Skanska (Sweden), a project development and construction group
Staples, Inc. (US), an office products company

Nielsen Norman Group's “Intranet Design Annual 2012: The Year’s 10 Best Intranets,” is available to download for $248 from the Nielsen Norman Group website at http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/design

About Nielsen Norman Group

Nielsen Norman Group (http://www.nngroup.com) is a user-experience research firm that advises companies on how to succeed through human-centered design of products and services. NN/g principals Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman and Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini are world-renowned user-experience pioneers who advocated human-centered design and usability long before it became popular to do so. Besides authoring books and evangelizing at NN/g events about user experience, they and others on the NN/g team offer high-level strategic consultation on the usability of websites, consumer products, software designs and anything else that needs to be easy-to-use. Media contact: Darcy Provo, darcy@nngroup.com, 415-871-1731.