Part of the Intranet Usability Guidelines Series

Improving intranet search is a difficult but important, task. Better intranet search behooves any organization, especially those with intranets with significant amounts of content or poor information architecture. Follow processes and UI patterns specific to effective and easy intranet search, which are sometimes quite different from website search design.

Web search in general has improved tremendously over the past few years, which raises user expectations on intranets. But enterprise search still lags behind, and in our studies we observed that employees are reluctant to search on intranets, even when browsing doesn’t work, due to poor past search experiences.

This 181-page report contains 113 design recommendations based on our usability research. Discussions and 140 screenshot illustrations supplement the findings.

Benefits

• Review patterns for good intranet front-end search and search engine results pages
• Follow tips for backend processes and work for ensuring that search works well
• Insight into how and when users search the intranet and what influences their experiences
• Checklist of 113 recommendations for improving intranet search functionality

Topics

• Search behavior on intranets: Different from the web
• Reasons people use (and do not use) search
• How the design impacts search usage
• Difficulty of presenting good search
• Fixing search
• Search front end
• Single (intranet-wide) search
• Presenting multiple search functions
• Search results
• Scoped search results
• Categorized results
• Filters
• Faceted search
• Search back-end
• Improving results rankings
• Employee directory search
• Employee search results

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).