Intranet Usability Guidelines: New Findings From 57 Intranets

Summary: Updated intranet guidelines feature enhanced content practices by teams, refined search design to meet elevated expectations, task-oriented navigation, and standardized design elements for visual consistency.

In our research for the 4th edition of the Intranet Usability Guidelines report, we studied 15 intranets at organizations around the world. The new report volumes contain 800 intranet screenshots and over 300 guidelines based on cumulative findings from usability testing 57 intranets over 18 years with over 285 employees.

This article summarizes the study methodology and a few findings across each topic. Review the new reports that are available now to learn more.

Effective Content Requires Intranet Ownership and Oversight

One of the biggest insights from this study was that some form of intranet-content oversight, whether through a centralized or hybrid content-management model , is needed to ensure high-quality content and to preserve the findability of information in both the intranet’s navigation and search.