Part of the Intranet Usability Guidelines Series

Usable intranets increase employee productivity and involvement. Intranets with usability issues cause employees to waste time valuable time and can decrease employee satisfaction. Use the step-by-step procedures to conduct sound behavioral research on your intranet, and determine how to improve it. Compare the usability of your intranet with other intranets by using the data in this report.

This 127-page report summarizes the qualitative and quantitative findings from the whole report series. You will understand the strategic implications of our findings on how and why people use their intranet.

This report also identifies how we conducted our user research and generated the guidelines for this report series, including a summary of user demographics, how we briefed and interacted with users and the tasks administered.

Benefits

• Understand our study methodology and apply it to help you assess guidelines for your intranet
• Steps and explanations for planning and conducting your own user research and benchmarking your intranet
• Calculate the return-on-investment (ROI) of improving your intranet’s usability

Topics

• About the research studies
• Quantitative findings
• Qualitative findings
• Benchmarking productivity
• ROI from Intranet Usability
• Benefits of using personas and scenarios for intranets
• How to create your own personas
• Example intranet personas
• How to conduct your own usability studies
• Recruiting participants
• Writing tasks
• Sample screener, facilitation script, and tasks
• Study logistics
• Collecting data and using measurements
• Field study methodology
• Other usability activities besides benchmarking and field studies

Download report excerpt (2MB PDF)

Research Method

The information in these reports is based on three separate rounds of user research with company employees as participants. We used two different research methods:

• One-on-one usability testing
• Field studies, during which we observed employees as they went about their normal work

In total, 176 people tested 42 intranets. The studies took place in the United States, the United Kingdom, Finland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, United Arab Emirates, and China (Hong Kong).