Summary:
As 3 studies of journalists show, they use the Web as a major research tool, exhibit high search dominance, and are impatient with bloated sites that don’t serve their needs or list a PR contact.

Journalists often work under tight deadlines.

While certainly not a novel insight, this statement leads directly to many of the guidelines for how to design corporate websites that are usable for journalists and deliver the desired PR impact. Most of the PR sections of sites we’ve studied fail to support journalists in their quest for the facts, information, and contacts they can use to write stories about companies and their products.

Websites must be painfully clear about a company’s purpose, products, and services. Websites for high-tech start-ups are particularly notorious for presenting generic, buzzword-filled mission statements that could apply equally well to both their worst competitors and companies producing completely different products.

If journalists can’t find what they’re looking for on a website, they might not include that company in their story. Journalists repeatedly said that poor website usability could reduce or completely eliminate their press coverage of a company. For example, after having a difficult time using a site, one journalist said:

“… I would be reluctant to go back to the site. If I had a choice to write about something else, then I would write about something else.”

Another journalist described what he’d do if he couldn’t find a press contact or the facts he needed for his story:

“Better not to write it than to get it wrong. I might avoid the subject altogether.”

Many journalists work from home. Many also have old computer equipment and aren’t exactly obsessed with downloading the latest software. Thus, non-standard data formats or cutting-edge technologies tend to clog their Internet connections and sometimes even crash their computers. It’s therefore wise to ensure that all your press materials work on low-end home computers running software that’s 2 versions behind the latest release. We recommend that sites present all press information as simple, standard HTML. Journalists dislike PDF just as much as other users do.
User Research: 3 Rounds
To find out how journalists use websites, we conducted 3 rounds of user research over a period of several years. We conducted most of the sessions in the United States, but also ran sessions in Denmark, Hong Kong, and the U.K. to ensure the international applicability of our findings.

A total of 40 journalists participated in the studies. They worked for a wide range of publications — from large national newspapers and magazines with millions of readers, to mid-sized local newspapers and specialized magazines with 100,000–500,000 readers, to smaller and highly targeted publications. In addition to print media, participants also wrote for radio shows and websites. Some of the participants were staff reporters, while others were freelancers.

We used several research methods:

* Traditional user testing in a usability lab.
* Site visits to the user’s location, which was often a home office (particularly for freelance journalists).
* Eyetracking studies, in which we recorded where users looked on the screen.

We tested 42 different websites and their press areas across the 3 research rounds. Sites ranged from huge companies — such as American Airlines, Bayer, and China Mobile — to smaller companies, B2B vendors, startups, non-profits, and government agencies.
Journalists’ Information Needs
The Web is one of the most important research tools for journalists. When asked how they would get basic information about a company or organization, all journalists in our studies said that they would begin by doing some Web research.

Most journalists started by searching an outside service — mainly Google, but also traditional services like Dow Jones Interactive and Lexis-Nexis — after which they visited the company’s own website. This finding emphasizes the importance of having a clean corporate website with a clearly labeled Press or PR section that can quickly provide information for journalists. It also emphasizes the need to be well represented in external search services (again, mainly Google at the time of this writing).

Journalists are not gullible, and they don’t take a company’s own word as truth. Indeed, almost all journalists said that press releases were useful only to find out how a company is trying to position itself. We strongly recommend that PR areas have links to external sources, including press coverage; journalists often consider articles from independent newspapers and magazines to be much more credible than a company’s own press releases. We’ve seen similar findings in studies of prospective customers evaluating products on consumer- and business-oriented sites, so links to external press coverage can also help promote sales.

The top-5 reasons journalists gave for visiting a company’s website are:

* Locate a PR contact (name and telephone number)
* Find basic facts about the company (spelling of an executive’s name, his/her age, headquarters location, and so on)
* Discern the company’s spin on events
* Check financial information
* Download images to use as illustrations in stories

This basic information must be easy to find and should be cleansed of the marketese and excessive verbiage that smother the facts on many sites. Journalists don’t have time to wade through deep, complex navigation trees or sift factual wheat from marketing chaff. In particular, pages must present information in well-organized chunks that are easy to scan. Distracting animations and irrelevant stock photography don’t help journalists who are in a hurry to find the facts.

The following example from our eyetracking research shows a journalist reviewing a list of financial statements for American Airlines’ parent corporation. Note how the user’s eyes skipped the blah-blah text and went straight for the list of items. Also note how most headings got only 1 or 2 fixations: headlines for press releases and other statements must be written so that journalists can grasp the gist by reading only a few words, because that’s how they scan such lists. It’s worth saying again: journalists are busy and work under tight deadlines. Design your PR pages accordingly.

Eyetracking plot of how a journalist read a website’s list of releases

Each blue dot represents one fixation of the user’s eyes.
(Bigger dots indicate longer dwell times.)
Facts and Humans
It’s amazing how many sites make it hard to find the company’s official name—a key fact that journalists often need for their articles.

In general, the more interesting facts you present about your company, products, and executives, the better for PR. Journalists look for facts they can use in their stories. Our study participants were much more excited about genuine information than about marketing claims, which they immediately discarded.

For example, here is one journalist’s take on some of the BMW site’s product information:

“This is actually more precise information. This is not a sales pitch. This term, ‘crumple zone,’ I would find use for in my article… About the lights, these are all high-tech things that I think readers would find interesting. Those are the kinds of specifics I would be looking for.”

The following gazeplot from our new eyetracking study shows a journalist reading a press release on TNT’s website. Note how the journalist focused on the facts in the initial bulleted list and the second table. The journalist hardly read the concluding paragraphs and mostly ignored the first table, which was not as interesting.

Eyetracking plot of how a journalist read a press release
Gazeplot of a journalist reading a press release.
Each blue dot represents one fixation of the user’s eyes.

Sites also must offer a simple way to contact a live human being in the PR department. Although a website can answer many basic questions and provide great help, journalists almost always want to talk to a person, too. Following are quotes from 2 journalists who had a particularly difficult time finding a PR contact and financial information:

“I’m sure I saw an E-mail us, but I forget where it was. I never know if someone is reading the e-mail. It’s not uncommon for me to have a deadline today, and I wouldn’t use e-mail if I needed it today. I would go without a quote from [this company].”

“My momentary frustration, I like to think it will not spill over into my story. But it makes me wonder about the competence of the people in the company. You know journalists use the site. Makes me think someone is being evasive, or that they are incompetent.”

Clearly, the ability to find information on a PR site has a strong impact on journalists’ impression of the site and thus on the way they perceive the company.
Changes in PR Usability
Because we conducted our research over several rounds since 2001, we can compare the situation in the past with today’s state of affairs. In doing so, we found 4 main changes:

* Better design. Professionally managed corporate websites now comply with more usability guidelines and are thus less likely to make the worst blunders on their PR pages. Although sites are still far from fully meeting journalists’ needs, they’re not as bad as they used to be. As a consequence, journalists today are more successful than in the past at getting the information they need. The biggest improvement relates to their most critical task: finding the PR contact’s telephone number.
* Increasing search dominance. In our early research, journalists were evenly split between going directly to a company’s website and using a search engine first. Today, journalists tend to use search as their first step. This is similar to the trend we’ve seen for regular users, who also rely more on search engines.
* Improved user technology. Journalists’ computers are now much less likely to crash because of PDF or other non-Web media files. Technology has definitely stabilized to some extent. However, we still recommended that you avoid PDF for press releases and most other PR information because the format annoys users.
* Embrace of multimedia (in concept). Journalists today better appreciate video, webcasts, and other multimedia. Their main complaint, however, is that multimedia content tends to be harder to use and to contain superficial information. Companies clearly need to work harder to turn “new media” into “useful media.”

A further change is that PR usability requirements have increased substantially. The new edition of our report contains 103 design guidelines; the first edition had only 32. The earlier guidelines still hold true, so to some extent little has changed in terms of journalists’ basic needs. But, beyond the basics, designers have to get many more details right for a website’s PR area to be up to snuff.

Commenting about a site that wasn’t up to snuff, a journalist from one of our studies summed up a feeling expressed by many others:

“It behooves the company to make their website easier to use. You immediately begin to hate the company when it’s not.”

Ultimately, PR-related usability comes down to a simple question: Why spend a fortune on outbound PR (trying to pitch journalists) when you neglect simple steps to increase the effectiveness of inbound PR (satisfying journalists who visit your website)?

#23 – How to run a design critique

By Scott Berkun, January 2003

Critique meeting in progressIn the early and middle phases of a project, teams need a way to understand and explore the current direction of the design. The challenge is to create the openness needed for good ideas to surface, while simultaneously cultivating the feedback and criticism necessary to resolve open issues. Unlike a brainstorming meeting, where the exclusive goal is to come up with new ideas, a critique meeting is focused on evaluating a set of existing ideas, and possibly identify future directions or changes. Instead of hoping that hallway and email discussions will lead the team in a good direction, it’s generally worth investing time to set up critique meetings to drive the design forward.
Goals of a design critique

A design critique meeting usually involves a small group of 3-7 to discuss a set of design sketches or prototypes. For a website or software design, there are many different attributes or constraints that might be worth discussing. You could focus purely on branding elements, ease of use concepts, or even engineering feasibility. It’s really up to whoever is running the meeting and what the most pressing issues for the project currently are. However, what’s most important, is that the goals of the meeting are stated at its beginning. If there are 3 or 4 specific lines of thought you want to make sure get critiqued, define them. Without goals or a basic framework for the kinds of design questions you want to explore, everyone will work from different assumptions, making for a frustrating meeting. It’s also worth clarifying any kinds of issues or questions that you’re not ready to answer, and when you expect to have answers for them.

If you are early in a project, critique meetings should emphasize the higher level user, customer and business goals, and minimize the focus on specific engineering constraints. It will be worth flagging design ideas that engineers or business managers have large concerns about, but hold off on completely eliminating them from the discussion. There may be opportunities to ask for more resources or make other adjustments to a project, if a stellar design concept or idea is championed successfully (e.g. perhaps a design idea exposes a new business plan that has more opportunities than the current one, and would justify a change in the project goals).

But as the project timeline progresses, and the end of the planning or design phase approaches, the tone of critique discussions should change. There should be increasing pressure to have definite answers or solutions to issues, and the bar for considering new ideas or directions should get continually higher. If managed well throughout the project timeline, the scope of critique discussions should peak during planning, and then continually decrease until specifications are written, and final decisions are made. (Shepherding the creative phase of a project is a significant challenge, and it’s rare to find a project manager than can manage it as well as the more production oriented implementation and release phases. Often there is a key leadership role for designers to play to fill this gap. Overall, the tone, content and quality of critique meetings is one indicator to how well the creative process is being managed).

Typical goals for critique meetings might include:

1. Obtain specific kinds of feedback from those in the room about a set of different design approaches for one feature or area of a website.
2. Compare how several different components of the same product are designed. (Are there elements that should be reused more? Do things that look similar behavior similarly? Etc.)
3. Discuss the user flow through a design, by examining each screen in the sequence that users would go through to complete a task. (Similar to a cognitive walkthrough).
4. Explore the designs of competing products, or designs of other products that have elements or qualities that you want to achieve.
5. Allow teammates with different job functions to provide feedback from their expertise. (QA might raising testing issues, development might ask feasibility questions, marketing might ask questions about advertising or partnerships, etc.)

These goals listed are mostly mutually exclusive. You might be able to manage two of these at the same time, if you’re a great meeting facilitator, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Secondary goals often include:

1. Provide some structure to the creative process of a project.
2. Improve your team’s ability to think about and discuss design ideas.
3. Teach non-designers about the design critique technique, so they can apply it to other kinds of problem solving situations.

Independent of the specific critique goals: If there are questions from your teammates about your design that don’t fit your intent for the meeting, make sure you come up with some way to address them outside of the meeting. During the meeting, write them down on a whiteboard or notepad, and take them with you when you leave. The more inclusive your design thinking is, the more influence and authority you’ll have over how project decisions are made. Even if the issues you are confronted with arise from decisions out of your control (a demand from the marketing team, or a new constraint from engineering) you want your designs, and your design process, to work with these issues, not around them. (Unless you feel confident that your superior design and skills of persuasion will convince someone with authority to change their mind.)
Who is in the room

conference roomA critique should allow a small group of people to review and discuss many ideas quickly and informally. You can’t be informal and intimate about ideas with more than 5 or 6 people in the room. Instead, you must narrow down your invite list to the people most critical to the design process. Try to forget about job titles or hierarchy, and instead, focus on the people who are most likely to understand the creative process, and give useful and meaningful feedback, both positive and negative.

Depending on the personalities of your teammates, make adjustments as necessary. For anyone on your team that isn’t invited to the meeting, allow them to look at any handouts or pictures, and give you their feedback. Or even better, make sure to forward them any of the notes you send out following the meeting. In most cases, they’ll see the quality of the dialog and kinds of discussions points that were raised, and ease up on their complaints about not being in the room. And even in the absolute worst case, make yourself available to listen to their feedback independent of the critique session. You can diffuse difficult teammates, appeasing them without derailing the critique meeting, and the creative momentum of the team.

One alternative for designers in larger organizations: you might be able to do design critiques with the other designers in your organization, even if each of you works on different projects. This can be a great way to build a sense of design community in your organization, and give you the benefit of other well trained design eyes, that are fresh to the problems your trying to solve. The downside to this is that you miss on the opportunity to build better design relationships with the non-designers on your team. In the best possible world, you might have time to do both kinds of critiques, at different times in your project.
Materials and rooms

Depending on the kinds of designs your working with, and the goals you have, you might arrange the room differently, and bring different kinds of materials.

In the simplest kind of critique, where you have several alternatives to the same design problem, make it easy for everyone to see each design approach. There are several ways to do this:

1. Print a stapled handout of the 5 or 6 pictures and give each person a copy. This works fine, unless you have prototypes for each design approach – the printouts won’t capture that It might be fine to have rough hand drawn sketches, if the folks in the room are capable of working with rough representations, or you might need to have more complete visual presentations of the design ideas. (I once made the mistake of showing some high powered marketing folks some hand drawn sketches: it was a disaster. Unfamiliar with design work, or design process, they naturally confused the low fidelity of the sketch, with the quality of the ideas. Learn from this
2. Use wall space in the room to display each of the designs. This is by far the best way to examine branding or compare/contrast different areas of the same website. If you’re new to a project, and want to illustrate how inconsistent certain design elements are, there is nothing better than putting them all up on the wall together, and asking everyone in the critique to walk the room and examine them. If you’ve never done this before, I guarantee you’ll hear a few people gasp.
3. If the room has a television or monitor, use your laptop to show each of the sketches or designs. If you’ve made prototypes, demo them. Personally, I find this is the most convenient way to work. It usually requires little preparation beyond the prototypes themselves, and if I’m facilitating the meeting, it gives me additional control over what we discuss and how the discussion goes. Typically, what’s on the monitor is what we’re going to talk about.
4. If you work in a large organization, you might have your choice of rooms to use. I recommend small conference rooms that would accommodate 4-8 people. You want a room with lots of whiteboard space for new ideas, or for taping up printouts. Ideal is to also have a television or monitor so that everyone can easily look at the same designs from a laptop or computer.

If you are working on a long project, there is value in reusing the same room for critiques. You may be able to leave certain screenshots up on the walls ,or in the hallway outside. Plus you have the psychological advantage of identifying a single physical place with the kind of thinking and dialog you want for a critique.
The Rules of order for good critiques

discussion during critique meetingWithout some basics set of rules or guidelines, discussions about ideas can go in any direction. Many creative people (writers, filmmakers, artists, etc.) recognize this, and have certain shared guidelines or assumptions for how critiques should be run. Instead of starting with opinions and points of view, participants in the critique work to clarify the creators intent with the work, and only then, respond to how well the work achieves or does not achieve that intention. (e.g. – If the film director wanted you to feel angry when watching the opening scene, and you don’t feel angry when you look at it, this is useful. But telling the filmmaker you don’t like movies that make you feel angry, might not be as useful.) So when it comes to software or web design, it’s important to clarify assumptions before offering a criticism or challenging an assumption.

The general rules of order are:

1. Start with clarifying questions. Clarify any assumptions about what the presented design is intended to do, or what kind of experience it is intended to create. Hopefully, this intent is derived from the overall project goals, which is already agreed upon.
2. Listen before speaking. Many times in work environments, we confuse conversations, which should be exchanges of ideas, with opportunities to inflict our opinions on others. If you take a moment to listen and understand before voicing an opinion, you’re open to hear something new that might challenge your old thinking. So don’t just wait for other people to finish, actively try to understand what’s being said, and reflect it back to the speaker.
3. Lead into explorations of alternatives. Ask questions that surface other choices the designer might not have recognized. Postpone judgments, unless there are obvious gaps between the designers intent, and the designs you are critiquing.
4. If it fits with the goals of the critique, point out situations, sequences, or elements within the design that may be problematic given what you know about your customers, the scenarios involved, or the project goals.
5. Avoid statements that refer to absolutes. Instead, make points referent to the goals of the design. Example:

bad: “This sucks and it’s ugly”
good: “Well, if the goal is to make this feel friendly, black and flaming red doesn’t convey that to me.”

bad: “How could anyone figure that out?”
good: “I think there’s something missing between step 3 and 4. It’s not clear to me what the sequence of operations is. How do you expect people to know where to click?”
6. Speak in context of your point of view. It’s fine to have a personal opinion, expressing your own preferences. But don’t confuse this with your perception of what your customers need or want. So make sure to specify which kind of opinion you’re offering. Hopefully there is data and research to help everyone agree on the likely customer perspective on different ideas.

Running the meeting

Someone should be responsible for leading and driving the meeting. This is more about facilitation than dictation. For a critique to work, everyone has to feel open about voicing their opinions and discussing ideas. It requires a different style of leadership than a status or accounting type meeting. The meeting leader, or facilitator, has to be comfortable asking quiet people to speak up, or loud or obnoxious people to quiet down.

I recommend that the creator of the designs lead the meeting. They should be confident and mature enough with the creative process to lead other people through it.

The biggest challenge to this is their ego. If the designer is leading the meeting, and controlling the discussion, there is every opportunity to push for feedback that makes their pet ideas shine, and exclude everything else. It requires maturity on the part of the designer to walk in the room with the attitude that the value of the meeting is to hear new thoughts and opinions, rather than simply to defend the ideas they already have. On a healthy team, the designer should be rewarded for the quality of their output, regardless of who may have made what suggestion, or gave birth to what initial idea, so there is little real conflict of interest. However, in the end, who runs the meeting is less important than the quality of discussion, and the overall progress of the design effort.

When a critique meeting is going well, it’s fun. It should feel like an informal conversation between people with the same goals, all trying to explore and surface good thinking. The person running the meeting has the responsibility of setting the right tone for this, preferably by example, and doing everything in their power to maintain that attitude and spirit in the room throughout the meeting. On a good team, this responsibility should come easily.
Pre and post meeting work

You may want to do some up front work to ensure that the critique goes smoothly. If you can define the goals when you call the meeting, include them in the meeting announcement. Also attach any pictures of the designs or sketches, so interested folks can get a head start in thinking about the designs.

After the critique, there is some additional work you can do to close the loop, and set yourself up for your next critique, or follow up meeting. Make sure to take notes during the meeting of key questions that were raised, or new issues and ideas that came up that you hadn’t thought about before. Send out a mail after the meeting with these details, and what the next steps in the design process will be. How long will it take before you have new designs to show? Is there a usability study that is the next milestone? How will this effort integrate with the project managers plans? If you don’t provide answers to these questions, someone else will, and you’ll default to yielding some control over the design process to them.

There are some organizations or project teams create critique forms, listing the standard questions or criteria that should be considered in a critique discussion. These are handed out during the meeting, used by participants to take notes, and then might be collected at the end. This might be more process than your team might want – so it’s up to you to figure out how formal or informal the critique discussions should be. I might recommend something like this for the first time you do it to help define this kind of meeting, but probably not as a general practice.
How often to run critiques

It depends heavily on the project and the team. If you have easy access to the people you are working with on the project, you might not need to have defined meetings for critiques. If the team is healthy, critique like conversations are probably happening in the hallway all the time. As long as you are in most of them, and people see you, the designer, as the driving force for the design effort, things might be fine. On the other hand, If you as the designer feel that most of the design conversations happen without you, intentionally or not, creating a weekly critique discussion can help put you back in the middle of the creative process.

(Note: A separate type of design meeting is a brainstorming discussion, where the dominant goal is to generate new ideas and explore as many different ideas as possible. This should not be confused with a design critique.)
Possible discussion points / questions to use

Here’s a sample list of design questions that might be of us to help guide the discussion. Again, depending on your goals for the critique, you might focus on, or avoid, some of these.

* What are the user scenarios the site is designed for? Walkthrough how each design would enable those scenarios.
* What known usability / design / business issues are these sketches trying to solve?
* What is the intended style of the design, and is it appropriate for the target audience?
* What is the intention of the style, and does it achieve the desired effect?
* Are there standard brand elements that should be used, and are they used appropriately?
* Are there similar software products or features that these designs should relate to?
* What usability heuristics does each design support well? (or not?)
* Where in the design are the most likely places for users to have trouble? and why?
* Are there reasonable design changes that might avoid these problem points?
* Does each design idea take advantage of things the user might already have learned?
* What are the pros and cons of each design idea, relative to each other?
* Are there any hybrid design ideas that are worth exploring, based on the designs in the room?
* What open issues might best be resolved by a usability study or other research?

Summary:
Intranets are getting more strategic, with increased collaboration support. Team size is growing by 12% per year, and platforms are becoming integrated, with a strong showing for SharePoint. Improving usability increased use by 106% on average.

The winners of the award for 10 best-designed intranets for 2009 are:

* Altran, a large engineering and innovation consultancy (France)
* Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a developer of computer and graphics processors (USA)
* BASF SE, the world’s leading chemical manufacturing company (Germany)
* COWI Group A/S, a consulting group focusing on engineering, environmental science, and economics (Denmark)
* Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT), a financial services network providing audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services (USA)
* Environmental Resource Management (ERM), one of the world’s leading providers of environmental consulting services (Global)
* HSBC Bank Brazil (Brazil)
* Kaupthing Bank (Iceland)
* L.L.Bean, a vendor of apparel and outdoor equipment (USA)
* McKesson Corporation, a large provider of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and health care information technologies (USA)

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu also won in 2002 for its Australian member firm’s intranet; this year, DTT’s worldwide intranet is the winner. As such, DTT joins a very small, elite group of companies that has won the award twice: Cisco Systems is the only other member.

As we’ve seen every year, great intranets are found around the world and in all industries. This year, we have our first winner from Latin America. We also have the first winners from Denmark, France, and Iceland; Germany and the U.S. have both provided many winners in the past. We have one other first this year: In a sign of ongoing globalization trends, we have a winner that is not headquartered in any individual country.

The consulting sector is this year’s best-represented industry, with 3 winners. Given the knowledge-intensive nature of consulting and this year’s trend toward more collaboration-focused intranets, this fact makes sense.
Bigger Intranet Budgets
As we’ve seen the last few years, large companies dominate among the winners. Among this year’s winners, the average organization has 37,500 employees. Even so, fairly small companies like Kaupthing Bank with 3,200 employees can still win. Good user experience doesn’t require size or humongous budgets; it requires talent and emphasis on meeting the users’ needs.

One of the strongest trends over the years that we’ve run this design competition is that intranet teams have been getting bigger. As the following chart shows, when we started honoring intranet projects in 2001, the average winning team had 6 members; today, the average team size is 14.

Average size of winning teams for the intranet design awards from 2001 to 2009
The long-term trend is toward bigger intranet teams, with a growth rate of 12% per year.

Still, what holds for company size also holds for the size of teams: You don’t have to be big to win. This year’s winners include one team with 5 members and another team with 6 members. In earlier years, we’ve honored winners with 1- or 2-person teams.

Even this year’s average team size of 14 is fairly small when it comes to providing a key work tool for organizations with 37,500 employees on average. One way to leverage intranet staff is to call on external resources as appropriate. Today, the predominant approach to running intranet design projects is to engage one or more consultants and external agencies to contribute parts — and only parts — of the design, while keeping overall control inside the company itself.

This year, 6 of the 10 winners were designed by some combination of in-house and outside resources. The remaining 4 projects were done completely by the company’s own staff. None of the winning intranets were designed exclusively by an external agency, even though this was a fairly common approach in earlier years.

It’s a healthy trend for companies to take more ownership of their intranets and devote resources to building sufficiently large intranet teams. In so doing, they gain in-house expertise in the main areas of intranet user experience. Not all companies can afford intranet teams that are big enough to do everything on their own, however. And, in any case, there are at least three reasons to periodically engage outsiders:

* To get a fresh, independent perspective. People who work on the same project for years can become too accustomed to a certain way of doing things. (Disclaimer: Because Nielsen Norman Group sometimes serves this role through impartial usability reviews or unbiased user testing, we might certainly be too sympathetic to the value of an outside perspective.)
* To provide deep expertise or a narrow skill set that the intranet team cannot justify adding to their permanent, full-time headcount.
* To alleviate workload during crunch times, particularly during large redesign projects or rollouts.

Strategic Intranets
Bigger intranet teams and increasing internal ownership of the intranet user experience both reflect the intranet’s growing strategic role in supporting work processes.

Intranets today do much more than simply host the company phone book and HR manuals — though these components remain critically important, and teams are continuing to improve them. COWI, for example, supplemented employee profiles with a feature that highlights commonalities between directory users and the profiled employees they view (an interesting combination of personalization, social networking, and the traditional staff directory.)

Nonetheless, with bigger teams and budgets and increased respect and strategic recognition, intranet functionality is expanding beyond such basic features. A simple statistic to quantify this trend is the fact that, at 473 pages, this year’s Intranet Design Annual is the most voluminous ever (326% longer than the first Design Annual in 2001, and 31% longer than last year’s report). As intranet teams accomplish more, more space is required to document the winning designs.

Another indication of the intranet’s growing strategic importance is the fact that ERM is the first winning team that reports directly to the company chairman. As in past years, most other winners report to either Corporate Communications or IT, and having teams report to the top isn’t likely to become commonplace. But this year does show dramatically increased executive visibility for the intranet in many of the winning organizations. This executive involvement typically results from companies viewing the intranet as a collaboration tool and appreciating the increased business efficiency that a good intranet brings.
Collaboration Features
This year’s winners showed a substantial increase in both collaboration support and social networking features. Although inspired by the open Internet’s “Web 2.0″ sites, these features often have a much stronger business model within the enterprise, simply because they’re more useful and less subject to noise and information pollution by bozos.

The most symbolic instantiation of this trend might be at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, where employees can add their own videos to the corporate TV network. Quite the enterprise YouTube.

Teams are also adding Facebook-like features to employee directories to enrich the profiles. That said, the designs are for a work environment — not for commenting on personal photos or supporting teenage dating behaviors. So, while it’s appropriate to be inspired by popular social networking websites, your actual user interface and features must be freshly designed specifically for the intranet. Internal blogs — whether by employees, department heads, or company leaders — were also thicker on the ground than in previous years.

The vast majority of our winning intranets feature CEO blogs. This is not new; we’ve seen some CEO blogs in earlier years. Indeed, HSBC Bank Brazil’s CEO blog started in 2005 and has since been viewed more than 2 million times and accumulated 8,000 employee comments. These statistics imply about 1 comment for every 250 employee viewings of the CEO blog, a level that’s consistent with other research on user participation in online communities. You can use this level as a rough benchmark to assess whether your own CEO blog is sufficiently inviting of employee participation.

Clearly, it’s a well-established feature. What’s new this year is the sheer prevalence of this communications tool; we now have enough good examples to specify 9 guidelines for an intranet CEO blog.

Another example of a striking social feature is ERM’s interactive forum. This tool has achieved mission-critical status in allowing consultants to post urgent requests for advice from their colleagues around the world. The forum has virtually eliminated panicky broadcast emails at ERM, thus improving the productivity of the many knowledge workers who are no longer interrupted by requests that they might have no qualifications or experience to solve. Even more important, this community feature often helps the company quickly construct better proposals for key clients on short deadlines.
Personalization and Customization
As many of this year’s winners show, intranet personalization is becoming increasingly sophisticated. The leading application of personalization is to provide each employee with news updates focused on their job role and personal interests. If intranets show everyone everything, information overload ensues and people either ignore the news area or squander their time reading irrelevant stories.

Simple customization can often generate sizeable productivity wins. For example, at McKesson, sales people can create a My Product List and My Favorite Reports, freeing them from having to wade through the much longer lists of all available options. Much appreciated when you’re on the phone with a customer and would prefer to focus your mental resources on closing the sale, rather than navigating the intranet.

At AMD, users can customize links directly in the main menu bar, which integrates the user’s personal favorites much more tightly with the intranet navigation than the traditionally separate Quick Links feature.

Multilingual intranets also make good use of personalization to increase usability by presenting pages in the user’s preferred language as much as possible. BASF’s main user interface elements are available in 13 different languages, and several other winners also have internationalization and localization support that goes far beyond what we see in most Internet websites.
Technology Platform: Unification Begins
In all previous years, the only conclusion regarding technology was that there was no universal platform for designing good intranets. Winners typically used an extraordinarily wide diversity of implementation packages.

Although this conclusion continues to hold this year, it is less pronounced.

Among the winning intranets, many are built on a single intranet platform that integrates most of the supporting features they need — including a content management system (CMS) and search. Some winners supplement their main platform with a few selected tools for specialized purposes — mainly Web analytics. If we were to hazard a prediction, it would be that traffic statistics, search log analysis, and other analytics tools will be substantially beefed up and integrated in future releases of the main intranet software platforms.

In total, the 10 winners were built on 26 different products — substantially fewer than the 41 used in 2008 or the 49 used in 2007. Most impressively, fully half of the winning intranets used SharePoint, especially the recent MOSS platform (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007). As the following chart shows, SharePoint use has grown dramatically in recent years. This is particularly impressive given that, from 2003–2006, the winning intranets didn’t use earlier versions of SharePoint at all.

Increasing use of Microsoft SharePoint among award-winning intranets from 2003 to 2009
Microsoft SharePoint has seen substantially increased use among well-designed intranets in recent years.
(In 2007, Microsoft’s own intranet was a winner, and they obviously used their own software, so the 2007 dot should be a notch lower if you consider only third-party projects.)

Despite this big growth in SharePoint use among the best intranets, the contest is far from over for intranet software platforms. Many other good enterprise software vendors offer widely used solutions. This year, for example, multiple winners used Autonomy, Google Search, and WebTrends.
Usability Growth
Over our intranet award’s 9-year history, we’ve seen a steady increase in user-centered design. The following chart shows the proportion of winning intranets that employed various methods across three different 3-year periods. The use of all methods has substantially increased; it’s particularly gratifying to see the extent to which designers are embracing paper prototyping and other low-cost testing methods.

Trend in use of user-centered design (UCD) on intranets from 2001 to 2009
The percent of winning intranets that employed some of the main usability methods in their design process.

To assess the ROI of intranet redesigns, teams primarily relied on usage metrics in terms of users, visits, or page views. Across this year’s winners, the average increase in intranet use was 106%. This is about the same as we’ve seen in previous years: The average usage increase in the 2005–2008 winners was 110%. So, roughly speaking, improving an intranet’s usability will double its use.

L.L.Bean conducted a benchmark study comparing their old and new designs. The old intranet had a success rate of 67% and an average time-on-task of 1 minute and 52 seconds. The new intranet has a success rate of 88% and users require only 54 seconds on average to perform the same tasks. In other words, users can perform more than twice as many tasks per hour with the new design. This improvement is somewhat more than the average across our intranet usability metrics benchmarks, but then L.L.Bean does have an award-winning intranet.

While it is easy to make the simple complicated (just look at the average video recorder), it takes skill to make the complex appear simple. Luckily that’s what Clearleft specialises in.

We’ve put together this handy worksheet to help you capture your vision for the project. Think of this document as a business plan for your website. The more information you can give us, the better we’ll be able to respond. Answer each question in a clear and concise manner, and skip any questions that don’t pertain to your project.

Because each member of your team may have a different vision for the project, we recommend completing this worksheet as a group. That way we won’t miss any important opinions. Once you’re happy that the worksheet clearly describes your project, email it to andy@clearleft.com and we’ll work out the right solution for you.

The Basics

What is the name of your company, your website and the current/intended web address?

Describe your company and the concept, product or service your site will provide.

Who are the main contacts for this project? Who has final approval?
Please list names, email addresses and phone numbers.

When do you expect the project to start and when does it need to be completed? Are there specific reasons for these dates?
e.g. tradeshow, product launch, end of year budget

Your budget dictates how much time we can devote to your website. What is the budget for this project?

Your Objectives

What are your main reasons for commissioning a new website?

List the business objectives for your website in order of importance.
e.g improve sales, increase customer satisfaction, reduce time spent searching for information etc.

How will you know if the site is a success?
e.g. 20% increase in sales, 70% of surveyed users expressing satisfaction, 30% reduction in time spent searching for info.

Current Site (if you have one)

What aspects of your current site work well and why are they successful?

What aspects of your current site are unsuccessful and why do you think that is?

If you update your current site using a content management system, please describe the system and its main features. Are you happy with the system?

Your Audience

Describe the different types of visitors to your website in as much detail as possible.
e.g. web-savvy students looking for bank loans.

How do you think your audience currently perceives your company?

Why will people use this kind of site?
e.g. to find the most suitable bank loan for their needs.

Why will people choose your site over others?
e.g. biggest choice of loans, easy to use, friendly advice etc.

What do you imagine people would want to do on your site?
e.g. find the cheapest bank loan, compare the top 5 loans etc.

Content and Design

Describe how you would like users to perceive the new site.
e.g. modern, professional, friendly, edgy, fun etc.

Please list the websites of competitors and organizations in a related field. What works? What doesn’t?

List websites you like the visual design of and explain why.
Sites like cssdrive.com and unmatchedstyle.com can be good sources of inspiration.

Outline any ideas you may have for your site. How would these features support your business goals and the goals of your user?
e.g. provide recommendations to help users find related items and promote up-selling.

If you need a content management system, please describe the features you would like.
e.g. updatable news, multiple authors,  stock control, user moderation, etc.

Additional Comments
We’ve tried to keep this worksheet as general as possible, but every project is unique. Here is your chance to add any extra information you think will be helpful.