Nielsen Full day training course offered at Usability Week Toronto
Intranet Usability
Guidelines and strategies for designing and managing intranets
An intranet typically has both mission-critical applications and enormous amounts of information. You will learn how to increase employee productivity and satisfaction by improving the intranet’s usability.
Examples and guidelines presented in this course are based on:
- Data and examples from research (including usability testing and field studies) conducted on 42 intranets
- Research of 56 intranets’ information architecture
- Insights gained from reviewing hundreds of intranet entries for NN/g’s Intranet Design Annual competition
- Work with clients (though specific content is anonymous in these cases)
Topics covered
- Intranet design process
- Understanding your users
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Intranet teams
- Models
- Common roles
- Balancing business and intranet goals
- Essential design elements and key characteristics of a well-designed intranet
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Using the intranet to support corporate culture
- Promoting the intranet
- Killer apps: The intranet’s most popular features
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Content management
- Approaches and processes
- Governance and management
- Training
- Creating standards and guidelines
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Accessing the intranet
- Name and URL
- Single sign-on
- Personalization
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Search
- Employee search
- Global, intranet-wide search
- Local, domain-specific search
- Filters
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Navigation
- Starting point for a task-based information architecture
- Faceted navigation
- Most effective ways to present information, following usability guidelines
- Homepage
- Project or team pages, and related features
- Corporate information: Company performance and management
- Multiple locations and languages
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Communication
- News
- Knowledge-sharing
- Social networking
- Executive announcements: Blogs and videos
- Print publications, online newsletters, and email
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Mobile intranets and enterprise apps
- Planning a mobile strategy
- Security and performance
- Selecting features
- Benchmark your intranet’s usability against others
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Research study methodology and results
- Numeric findings from usability sessions
- How to conduct your own study
- Return on investment (ROI)
Format
The basis of the course is a lecture format with a couple of group exercises to reinforce the learned principles and guidelines.
The course also includes:
- Findings from our own usability studies
- Screenshots of designs that work and don’t work, and why
- Opportunities to ask questions and get answers
Instructor
Amy Schade
Amy Schade works with clients large and small in a variety of industries such as telecommunications, e-commerce, government, travel, automotive, music, publishing, banking, non-profit and education, including extensive work on corporate intranets. She has conducted worldwide user research, including longitudinal studies, remote studies and eyetracking research, running studies in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia. Read more about Amy
Amy Schade works with clients large and small in a variety of industries such as telecommunications, e-commerce, government, travel, automotive, music, publishing, banking, non-profit and education, including extensive work on corporate intranets. She has conducted worldwide user research, including longitudinal studies, remote studies and eyetracking research, running studies in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia. Read more about Amy