Note: This article appeared in Intranet Professional, prior to its re-launch as Intranets in 2004.

Recently Intranet Professional asked Jakob Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, about critical issues all Web designers need to consider when tasked with meeting user requirements on an intranet.

IP: When designing an intranet, what would you consider the three wisest considerations to address for the user experience?

JN: Number one is no doubt consistency, design standards, and templates, leading to a unified user experience across the entire intranet. It is not sufficient to design the home page or the top few levels of navigation, even though that's often the mandate of the central intranet team. It's necessary to provide a standard design for all pages on the intranet and take steps to ensure that departments follow this standard so that users can move around the intranet without constantly getting surprised by changing design conventions.  

Second would be search. Any midsize or large intranet will contain so much information that it is not realistic for users to find it all by pure navigation. In our testing of employee productivity with intranets, the quality of search accounts for 43 percent of the difference in time on task between intranets with high usability and low usability.

Third would be continuous updates of content, in particular with respect to news on the top levels of the intranet, but also with respect to descriptions of groups, individuals, and projects. For the intranet to truly become a corporatewide information infrastructure, it must be up-to-date and the first place people turn when they want to find out about something. This doesn't happen with stale content.

IP: What is the top ongoing challenge for Web design? What are some successful ways this has been addressed?

JN: Management doesn't see the intranet as a productivity tool but as a cost center. Instead of spending a small amount of money on making information easy to find and easy to comprehend, companies waste a much large amount of money on paying employees to flail around while being lost on the intranet. but as a cost center. Instead of spending a small amount of money on making information easy to find and easy to comprehend, companies waste a much large amount of money on paying employees to flail around while being lost on the intranet.

Even companies that do fund their intranets don't give the intranet team the clout to impose standardized design templates and information architecture on individual departments. Result: every page is different. Users get lost.

These two issues are really management issues more than they are design issues. In other words, designers will never succeed in building a good intranet until those in charge decide to make productivity a priority and give the design team a mandate to fix the entire intranet, including elements that are "owned" by other departments.

The most successful example was Wal-Mart, where they operate under the philosophy that the central intranet team owns the design, and the departments own the content that's placed inside templates provided by the design team.

Some companies swear by software solutions such as portals, but truly the most important two steps are to acquire the authority to make standards happen and then to design good templates that are used by everybody. Whether these templates are enforced by software or by policy is less important, though obviously it's less easy to cheat the computer than a standards committee.

IP: What design principles, features, or other characteristics will drive year-over-year success for intranets?

JN: So far, we have just been fixing stupidities, such as the bowl of spaghetti that is the "information architecture" when everybody just puts up their own uncoordinated sites. In the long run, true success will come from task support. That is, cutting out the impediments to job performance that cause most employees to work below their potential. This is easy to say but hard to do, since it requires an understanding of the workflow in each company.

The concepts of groupware, knowledge management, and workflow support are much talked about but need to be taken beyond buzzword status. This means starting with a focus on people and what they actually do. Spend time playing the fly on the wall, and see how an employee goes through day. Make notes of every workaround and every time the employee would benefit from having a piece of information but doesn't look it up (or tries but can't find it). These incidents can form the basis for new intranet features that can provide useful task support, especially if many people have the same problems.

IP: If a person is just beginning to think about learning more about intranet design, what resources are important for him or her to review before doing anything else?

JN: A big challenge for intranet designers compared with people who design public Web sites is the difficulty of getting hands-on experience with a wide range of design alternatives. If you are designing a corporate Web site, you can easily find 10 other sites that solve the same problem and see how well they perform. You can even run a quick competitive usability study with a bunch of customers accessing each of these sites. For intranets, you only have your own. This lack of exposure to the usability of alternative designs is the main reason we have been publishing a series of reports that feature a range of intranets and analyze their usability. It's not that we want designers to copy these intranets, but much can be learned by looking at what works well and less well in a wide range of designs.

In addition to reading, live usability testing of your own intranet is invaluable. The first study doesn't have to be big or expensive. In fact, 1 or 2 days of testing will suffice to produce a long list of recommended improvements to the design. And even more important, watching your co-workers struggle with usability problems is a revolutionary event that truly drives home the usability message. It's the best learning experience you can get.

IP: Marshall McLuhan is famous for saying the medium is the message—what do you think that means for Web designers today? How does design fit with technology platforms, business process, and ongoing content management?

JN: I actually think that the message is the message. And the message is the medium as well, to a great extent, for intranets and Web sites. Users only care about the content and ignore all the fancy technology features that are so beloved of the people who work in the field. When a new page comes up, the first place people look is smack in the middle of the upper part of the page—where the content usually sits.

The more the design can become invisible, the better. Allow users to focus on the content they need for their job and don't call attention to how it's implemented.