The Leading Intranets in Nielsen Norman Group Competition Shift the Priority in Knowledge...

The Leading Intranets in Nielsen Norman Group Competition Shift the Priority in Knowledge Management

NNG Announces this Year's World's 10 Best Intranets and the Top
Trends in Intranets
SAN FRANCISCO--(Business Wire)--Intranets have for years played a key role in knowledge management
as repositories for data, and platforms for information sharing. In
announcing the winners of its eighth annual intranet design
competition, user-experience research firm Nielsen Norman Group noted
that today's leading intranets are going well beyond this, flipping
the priority from information to people. The recognition that
knowledge resides with people has led to a new design emphasis on
methods of accessing people--rather than data--to obtain the needed
knowledge.

"It's now a given to have basic features such as an employee
directory on a company's intranet," said usability expert Jakob
Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group, "What's new is the polish
and sophistication that companies are giving them so that they serve
even more useful purposes, which in the case of the directory means
providing more than an employee's name, rank and serial number, but
also his subject-matter expertise, for example."

The world's 10 best intranets named in this year's contest provide
numerous examples of this and other trends in intranet design, and are
each described in detail in Nielsen Norman Group's 365-page report
entitled "Intranet Design Annual 2008: The Year's 10 Best Intranets,"
co-authored by Nielsen Norman Group director of research Kara Pernice,
co-founder Jakob Nielsen, and researcher Patty Caya.

The 10 organizations with winning intranets are based in six
different countries and have employee populations ranging in size from
200 to 200,000. In alphabetical order, they are: Bank of America (US);
Bankinter S.A. (Spain); Barnes & Noble (US); British Airways (UK);
Campbell Soup Company (US); Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corporation
(US); IKEA North America Service, LLC, (US); Ministry of Transport
(New Zealand); New South Wales Department of Primary Industries
(Australia); SAP AG (Germany).

"This year's stellar intranets covered all the basics, but
presented them better than we've ever seen before. The quality level
has definitely gone up. Helping this is another important trend:
Intranets are moving to having a single, well-structured information
architecture with a single, consistent page design. This used to be
highly contested in years past, with individual departments
maintaining their independence and the 'right' to their own, usually
poor design," said Kara Pernice, director of research, Nielsen Norman
Group.

Additional trends noted in Nielsen Norman Group's 2008 Intranet
Design Annual include:

Company News: The leading intranets are all allocating major
homepage real estate to company and industry news, and investing
significant resources in editing and maintaining their news areas.

Productivity Focus: Many of the most important features on the
winning intranets directly support everyday work, which can be
accomplished both with advanced applications and smaller tools such as
providing a form to reserve a department vehicle for offsite
assignments.

Personalization: Organizations are taking the leap to offer deeper
personalization on their intranets so that information is either
pushed or hidden depending on each employee's individual needs.

"Intranet Design Annual 2008: The Year's Ten Best Intranets,"
which presents detailed case studies of the 10 winners, is available
to download for $198 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. Nielsen Norman Group
principals Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman and Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini are
each world-renowned experts in usability and human use of technology.
Besides authoring books and evangelizing about user experience, they
and the other user-experience specialists at Nielsen Norman Group
offer high-level strategic consultation on usability of websites,
consumer products, software designs and anything else that needs to be
easy-to-use. Media contact: Darcy Provo, Antenna Group,
darcy@antennagroup.com, 415-977-1920.

Antenna Group
Darcy Provo, 415-977-1920
darcy@antennagroup.com

Copyright Business Wire 2008