Intranet Usability 1: User Experience 2008 Conference

Chicago

Amsterdam

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Intranet Usability 1

Chicago: Monday, November 3
Amsterdam: Monday, November 17

Kara Pernice
Amy Schade

Full-Day Tutorial

An intranet typically houses both mission-critical applications and enormous amounts of information. Whatever it offers, an intranet’s success—and that of the employees it serves—hinges on usability.

In this seminar, we’ll detail top considerations for planning a best-practices intranet and the art of running it—the managerial aspects of intranet design. We’ll also discuss intranet teams, content management, and how corporate culture influences an intranet.

This seminar is based on:

Data and examples from research conducted on 27 intranets (including user testing and field studies)
Research of 56 organizations’ intranet information architecture
Insights gained from reviewing hundreds of intranet entries for NN/g’s Intranet Design Annual competition

In addition to numerous examples culled from our extensive research, we’ll present examples from winning intranet designs drawn from our competition’s eight-year history.

What You’ll Learn

You’ll leave this session knowing:

Essential design elements and key characteristics of a well-designed intranet
Guidelines for designing those elements
Key steps for creating an effective, well-designed intranet
What not to do
The importance of goal setting in site design
How to reflecting corporate culture and organizational goals
Keys to creating and managing content
How to use the intranet as a communication tool
Basics ways to benchmark your intranet’s usability against others

Course Outline

Introduction

Study methodology
Test tasks
Common intranet tasks
Numeric findings from usability sessions
Return on investment (ROI)

Review of intranets studied

Organizations studied
Users supported
How the intranets started

Planning the intranet

Intranet teams: Models, common roles, goals
Management topics
Creating standards and guidelines
Using the intranet to support corporate culture
Killer apps
Planning features
Work/life balance

Content management

Approaches and processes
Governance and management
Training
Open intranets

Discussion of usability guidelines, including many design examples for elements such as:

The homepage
Project or team pages, and related features
Corporate information: Company performance and management
Multiple locations and languages

Communication

Executive announcements: Q&A and video formats
Knowledge sharing for peers
Processes for communicating using the intranet
Print publications and online newsletters and email

Multiple offices

Locations
Languages

Work/life balance

Classifieds
Personal/team-related accomplishments
Cafeteria menus

Format

This full-day tutorial includes lectures and discussions.

Handouts

Copies of the presentation slides and a free copy of Nielsen Norman Group’s research report Intranet Usability Guidelines vol. 1: Understanding and Studying Users (Test Data, User Behavior, and Methodology).

Who Should Attend?

Anyone who works on intranet design or strategy and has not previously attended our Intranet Usability tutorials. Attendees should have a general familiarity with intranets and their design.

Instructors

Kara Pernice is the Director of Research at Nielsen Norman Group and heads the company’s East Coast operations. She has led many of NN/g’s major intercontinental research studies, generated the resulting design guidelines, and coauthored several reports, including designing corporate intranets, designing for accessibility, designing for people over the age of 65, and designing websites to maximize press relations. She is a leading authority on intranet usability and eyetracking usability (The Wall Street Journal called her “an intranet guru”). She judged the submissions for and coauthored NN/g’s government intranets report and its Intranet Design Annuals in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008. She has also done extensive research in evaluating emotion and design, has given presentations on a wide range of topics, and has worked with clients in various industries, including publishing, entertainment, technology, finance, pharmaceuticals, and government. She has more than 15 years of experience in evaluating usability, and has established successful usability programs at Lotus Development, Iris Associates (an IBM subsidiary), and Interleaf. She chaired the Usability Professionals’ Association 2000 and 2001 conferences, and served as 2002 conference advisor. She holds an M.B.A. from Northeastern University and a B.A. from Simmons College.

Amy Schade is a User Experience Specialist based in Nielsen Norman Group’s East Coast office. Schade has worked with clients internationally in music, insurance, travel, banking, education, and e-commerce industries, and has conducted user testing and performed reviews on a wide variety of websites and intranets in the United States, Europe, and Asia. She presents tutorials and workshops on user testing, intranet usability, writing for the Web, and email newsletter usability. She co-authored the NN/g reports on intranet usability, intranet information architecture, email newsletters, and site map usability, and has conducted many of the user test sessions for reports on accessibility and usability for senior citizens. Before joining NN/g, Schade was an information architect at Arc eConsultancy, where she created and revised architectures for sites ranging from a family-related content site to a transaction-based sponsorship marketplace. Schade has also held various positions in Web production and advertising. She has a Master's from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.