Nielsen Norman Group Report:

Usability of Intranet Portals:
Report from the Trenches

104 pages PDF format
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$188 for a single report, $398 for the report and the right to make copies within your organization. (No shipping/handling fees will be added: it's a download.)

Summary

Intranet portals are being pushed heavily by technology vendors, but the experience from the many portal managers contacted for this report is that technology only accounts for about one-third of the issues they had in implementing their portals. Organizational issues and company politics account for two thirds.

This report presents a unique perspective on intranet portals: not that of a vendor trying to push a specific solution, but the user experience perspective. What do portals mean to the users (your employees) and how can the portal team deliver what the organization needs? To find out, we talked to portal managers who have been there, done that. This is not a report about what supposedly works. This is a report on what actually works, given the way people behave in big organizations.

Some of the most touted features of intranet portals turn out not to be needed in most companies: for example, role-based personalization usually works better than individual personalization. Similarly, one of the world's five largest law firms discovered that its clients needed much simpler dealrooms than promoted by most vendors of extranet portals.

The report is based on case studies from portal projects in the following companies and government agencies as well as additional insights from several other experienced portal managers who preferred to remain anonymous:

• ABB
• BEKK Consulting
• Burke Consortium
• City of New York
• Cognos
• Credit Suisse Financial Services
• Eversheds
• HarperCollins
• HP Europe
• KPMG
• Portland Public Schools
• Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors
• Sprint
• Towers Perrin
• US Navy's Sea Systems Command
• Verizon
• Weber Associates

This report contains 58 screenshots of intranet portal designs, with analysis of why they worked well or didn't work.

Table of Contents

• Executive summary
  • Problems solved by portals
  • Internet vs. intranet portals
    • Business model
    • User profile
    • Search
    • Design process
  • Wild Web vs. single tool
• Foreword
  • Credits
• Defining the portal
  • What is a portal for?
  • Making information usable
  • Cutting out fragmentation
  • Introducing consistent navigation
  • Avoiding reinventing the wheel
  • Eliminating information wastage
• Company politics
  • Who's in charge?
  • Winning over the users
  • Winning over the content providers
  • Ways to deal with political problems
    • Get strong backing from the top
    • Involve the users early
    • Use both carrot and stick
    • Give people some room for manoeuvre
    • Remember that seeing is believing
    • Take it slowly
  • Lessons learned: 8 best practices
• Managing content
  • Technology issues
  • Integration issues
  • Who manages content?
  • Who's the ultimate authority?
  • Lessons learned: 8 best practices
• Consulting the users
  • User trials at Eversheds
  • Iterative testing at NAVSEA
  • Reaching remote users at HP Europe
  • Surveys at KPMG
  • Working against time and budget at Portland
  • Prototyping at Sprint
  • Lessons learned: 6 best practices
• Site design and structure
  • Home page
  • Or no home page?
  • Subsites
  • Information architecture
  • Building a global architecture at KPMG
  • Standards and guidelines
  • Introducing guidelines at CSFS
  • Unifying the structure at HarperCollins
  • A relaxed approach at Verizon
  • Lessons learned: 9 best practices
• Personalization
  • A sense of community at CSFS
  • Functional approach at Hewlett Packard Europe
  • Limited personalization at Navsea
  • Role-based approach at Portland Public Schools
  • Page personalization at Sprint
  • Individual personalization
  • Portals without personalization
  • Lessons learned: 3 best practices
• Applications
  • Employee directory
  • Timesheets
  • Employee self-service
  • Collaboration tools
  • Line of business applications
  • External information
  • Organization chart
  • Document management
• Security and single sign-on
  • Big potential savings at Verizon
  • A pragmatic approach at NAVSEA
  • Moving towards single sign-on at Sprint
  • Lessons learned: 4 best practices
• Search
  • Keyword vs full text
  • Specific searches
  • Relevance
  • Lessons learned: 4 best practices
• Return on investment
  • Productivity improvements
  • Cutting out duplication
  • New revenue sources
  • Support for business goals - and business change
  • Lessons learned: 3 best practices

What You Get

• Checklist of 45 best practices: review your portal project for these 45 items, and you will discover several things that you might want to do differently to benefit from the experience of those who have been through the same problems before.
• 58 screenshots of intranet portals from many different companies, including several before-after comparisons.
• Knowledge to make your portal easier for employees to use; thus increasing the ROI on your project.
• Vendor-independent analysis. Other companies that charge much higher prices for their reports receive large amounts of money from vendors. In contrast, we don't pull any punches and this report includes some pretty harsh comments about some of the main portal vendors. (We also don't have anything against the vendors: we are simply reporting what we found in our research.)

Who Should Read This Report?

• Anybody who is responsible for the design, implementation, or strategy of intranets for major companies or organizations.
• People in charge of extranet portals.

Collecting similar benchmarking and best practice information from a large set of portal projects yourself would probably take you two to three months, if you could ever get enough companies to let you in the door. Realistically, reading this report is the only way you will get the scoop on this many intranet portals.

Please help us continue publish low-price reports by buying a site license if you have colleagues who will read the report. If you only need it for yourself, then that's obviously what the single-user license is for. If somebody "gives" you a copy, then please buy a download anyway to keep prices down in the future.

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