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Nielsen Norman Group Names 2010's 10 Best Intranets
[January 07, 2010]

Nielsen Norman Group Names 2010's 10 Best Intranets


Jan 07, 2010 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- The Nielsen Norman Group announced the winners of its tenth annual intranet design contest.

"The biggest websites set user expectations, and the smartest intranets are quick to recognize and meet them for their own users," said Jakob Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group, "That's exactly what our winning intranets did in this, the year of all-things-social and mobile on the Web. Many winners offered sophisticated social networking features and several created separate mobile designs optimized for smart phones." Even though most intranets are likely accessed from the office, people increasingly expect "anytime, anyplace" access, and companies are starting to evaluate what that means specifically for their employees. Two of the winning intranets created special mobile-specific sites with scaled-back offerings of critical content and applications; another built a dedicated intranet application optimized for its preferred platform, the iPhone.



Social features in this year's winning intranets emphasized two levels of interaction: providing the opportunity for employees to get to know one another as individuals and offering workgroup support that encourages work-related connections. Users on winning sites could create profiles, share content and even share bookmarks to their favorite sites.

"In addition to the social and mobile focus, we saw other trends that were continuations of long-term trends that we've identified and commented on in the past, such as an increased focus on optimizing search and expanding personalization," said Nielsen Norman Group director Amy Schade. "This year's best intranets showed steady improvements over those in previous years, indicating that we're benefiting from a process of continuous quality improvement for intranet user experience." The world's top intranets provide numerous illustrations of the current trends and are described in detail in Nielsen Norman Group's 449-page report entitled "Intranet Design Annual 2010: The Year's 10 Best Intranets," co-authored by Amy Schade, Jakob Nielsen and researcher Patty Caya.


The 10 organizations with winning intranets are headquartered in three countries and have a median company size of 6,350 employees. The average size of the teams managing the intranets was 14 people.

In alphabetical order, the 2010 world's 10 best intranets are: - Enbridge, a company focusing on energy transportation and distribution in North America (Canada) - General Electric, a diversified technology, media and financial services company (USA) - Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a non-profit medical research organization (USA) - Huron Consulting Group, a consulting company (USA) - Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a NASA Center managing robotic spacecraft in exploration of Earth, the solar system and the universe (USA) - The MITRE Corp., a not-for-profit organization managing four federally funded research and development centers (USA) - SCANA Corp., a Fortune 500 energy-based holding company (USA) - TrendMicro, a supplier of Internet content security (Japan) - URS Corp., a provider of engineering, construction and technical services for public agencies and private sector companies (USA) - Walmart, a retailer with more than 8,159 retail units under 55 different banners in 15 countries (USA) Report Information: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/design More Information: http://www.nngroup.com ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected]))

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