Intranet designers have long known the importance of quality content for engaging employees in their company’s intranet and are constantly developing new strategies around content. This year’s best intranet design teams took a creative tack: They focused their attention on supporting the content creators themselves, according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen whose user-experience research firm Nielsen Norman Group today announced the winners of its 16th annual Intranet Design contest. This year’s winning intranet design teams and their intranets are featured in detail in Nielsen Norman Group’s new 500-page report “Intranet Design Annual 2016: The Year’s 10 Best Intranets,” which is now available on the company’s website.

“The teams running today’s best intranets know that engaging content depends upon its content authors, so they’re developing ways to nurture this important group of people,” said Jakob Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group, “The community, gamification, and simple help inspires and assists content creators.”

Some of the strategies used by this year’s winning intranet teams to support and nurture their content authors include providing online training videos and easy-to-use tools for content management and recognizing content authors’ efforts with titles such as “Communications Hero” and “Intranet Ambassador.”

Demonstrating these and other successful intranet-design strategies, the world's 10 best intranets for 2016 are (in alphabetical order):

  • American Cancer Society (United States), a global nonprofit voluntary health organization fighting against cancer
  • Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP (United States), a financial services law firm
  • The Co-operators Group Limited (Canada), a co-operative insurance and financial services organization
  • DORMA (Germany), since September 2015 part of the newly formed dorma+kaba Group, whose 16,000 employees produce and market door technology systems and allied products around the globe
  • Enbridge Inc. (Canada), a company that transports, generates, and distributes energy across North America
  • Intermountain Healthcare (United States), a not-for-profit health system with 22 hospitals and 185 clinics serving Utah and southeastern Idaho
  • NAV CANADA (Canada), Canada’s Air Navigation Service Provider (ANSP) that manages 12 million aircraft movements a year for 40,000 customers across 18 million square kilometers, making it the world’s second largest ANSP by traffic volume
  • Repsol S.A. (Spain), a private energy company providing service in more than 40 countries
  • Salini Impregilo SpA (Italy), a global construction company specializing in complex infrastructure projects and operating in 50 countries
  • The Swedish Parliament (Sweden), Sweden’s primary representative forum, elected by the people in general elections

Six of the 10 winners are headquartered in North America with three each from the U.S. and Canada. The average size of the winning organizations is 12,500. This is the second win for Enbridge, which was recognized previously in NN/g’s 2010 Intranet Design Annual.

Other trends to emerge from this year’s intranet design contest include:

Expanded User Research — Knowing that the only way to ensure a great design is to understand what employees do and need, this year’s winning intranets expanded their user research beyond occasional surveys to include conducting in-depth personal interviews with key stakeholders and observing users as they perform tasks.

Multi-language Support — The decision about whether to offer multi-language support for an intranet is often made at the upper-management level. It appears from this year’s roster of winning intranets that more companies are recognizing the benefits of providing translation capabilities.

Photos Gain Prominence — As a result perhaps of better cameras on phones today or an increased commitment to providing more-engaging content, all of the winning intranets prominently feature high-quality photographs.

Nielsen Norman Group's "Intranet Design Annual 2016: The Year’s 10 Best Intranets,” co-authored by Kara Pernice, Amy Schade and Patty Caya is available to download for $248 from the Nielsen Norman Group website at
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet-design-annual/

About Nielsen Norman Group

Nielsen Norman Group (http://www.nngroup.com) in an evidence-based user experience research, training and consulting firm that advises companies on how to improve the bottom line through human-centered design of products and services. NN/g principals Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman and Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini are world-renowned user experience experts who were advocating human-centered design and usability long before it became popular to do so. Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Silicon Valley, NN/g evaluates interfaces of all kinds and guides the critical design decisions that make websites, applications, intranets and products achieve their full potential for businesses and their users.