https://www.nngroup.com/articles/sharepoint-destroy-intranet-design/ Skip navigation * Log in to UX Certification Nielsen Norman Group logoNielsen Norman Group World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience * Home * Articles * Training & Events * Consulting * Reports & Books * About NN/g [ ] Menu * Home * Articles * [ ] Training & Events + Overview + Browse Courses + Virtual Training + In-Person Training + Series + Team Training + UX Certification * [ ] Consulting + Overview + User Testing + Customized User Research + Expert Review + Team Training + Intensive Applied Workshops + Keynote Speaking * Reports & Books * [ ] About NN/g + Overview + People + History + Clients + News + Contact Us * Log in Browse All Topics & Authors Topics * Agile * Design Process * Ecommerce * Intranets * Navigation * Psychology and UX * Research Methods * Study Guides * User Testing * Web Usability * Writing for the Web * See all topics All Article Topics * See fewer topics * Accessibility * Agile * Analytics & Metrics * Application Design * B2B Websites * Behavior Patterns * Branding * Content Strategy * Corporate Websites * Customer Journeys * Design Patterns * Design Process * Ecommerce * Email * Eyetracking * Heuristic Evaluation * Human Computer Interaction * Ideation * Information Architecture * Interaction Design * International Users * Intranets * Managing UX Teams * Mobile & Tablet * Navigation * Non-Profit Websites * Personas * Persuasive Design * Prototyping * Psychology and UX * Remote UX Work * Research Methods * Search * Social Media * Strategy * Study Guides * User Testing * UX Humor * UX Teams * Visual Design * Web Usability * Writing for the Web * Young Users Popular Articles * 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design * Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking * When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods * Service Blueprints: Definition * Journey Mapping 101 * The Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice * Between-Subjects vs. Within-Subjects Study Design * UX Research Cheat Sheet * Usability 101: Introduction to Usability * Usability Testing 101 Recent Articles * Why Field-Study Sessions Go Wrong: 5 Common Problems * Personas: Study Guide * Augmented-Reality Calibration in Mobile Apps: 10 Guidelines * Successful Onboarding for New Hires in UX Roles * How K-Pop Apps Create the Illusion of Private Messaging with Celebrities Recent Videos * Design for Them Not for You (UX Slogan #13) * Empty States in Application Design: 3 Guidelines * Strategic & Reactionary User Research * UX Design Prioritization Methods * Vertical Navigation Authors * Bruce Tognazzini * Don Norman * Jakob Nielsen * See all authors All Authors * See fewer authors * Mayya Azarova * Sana Behnam * Matt Brown * Raluca Budiu * Patty Caya * Therese Fessenden * Sarah Gibbons * Kelley Gordon * Aurora Harley * Alita Joyce * Anna Kaley * Lexie Kane * Kate Kaplan * Tanner Kohler * Rachel Krause * Page Laubheimer * Feifei Liu * Hoa Loranger * Kate Moran * Tim Neusesser * Jakob Nielsen * Don Norman * Kara Pernice * Sara Ramaswamy * Christian Rohrer * Maria Rosala * Kim Salazar * Katie Sherwin * Evan Sunwall * Samhita Tankala * Bruce Tognazzini * Kathryn Whitenton * Lillian Yang 2 Does SharePoint Destroy Intranet Design? Summary: As intranet projects benefit from powerful implementation platforms, teams should focus on optimizing the user experience for specific organizational needs, as 4 winning examples show. By Jakob Nielsen * Jakob Nielsen on 2010-06-06 June 6, 2010 Topics: Intranets * Intranets Intranets Share this article: * * * Several participants at recent Usability Week conferences asked me whether prospects were bleak for intranet designers given the trend for more and more intranets to be built on SharePoint. It's true that it's less work to build on top of an intranet-optimized system, as opposed to developing an intranet from scratch or patching it together from a bunch of website-oriented tools. But less work doesn't mean no work. And it certainly doesn't mean no usability work. The basis for all usability is to relate the design to two questions: who are the users and what are their tasks? The answers show how intranets differ from websites: * Users = employees instead of customers * Tasks = work instead of shopping These differences are why it makes sense to have separate usability guidelines for intranets and why products such as SharePoint exist. (Other vendors offer similar solutions; I use SharePoint here because it was the most widely used platform among winners of our Intranet Design Annual usability competition. We don't endorse any specific software.) Intranets Differ Although there are high-level similarities across intranets, many differences emerge once we delve into the details. As an example, consider 4 of the winning intranets for 2010 -- they all use SharePoint, but they don't all look the same: Homepages of 4 Intranet Design Annual winners. Top row: Huron Consulting Group and Enbridge. Bottom row: SCANA Corp. and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) The differences go far beyond surface characteristics such as color scheme and choice of images. The two bottom intranets have a portal feel, with many widgets on the page, whereas the upper two have more of a homepage feel. The intranets also deemed different tools important enough to be featured on the homepage: say, a calendar vs. a traffic map. Let's look at the top navigation categories: Huron Consulting Enbridge SCANA Corp. Jet Propulsion Group Laboratory Our People Me & My Career Health, Wealth Employee Center & Career Our Company Our People About SCANA Tools & Services Employee Services Policies & Departments Newsfeeds Procedures Human Resources News & Events Tools & Line Orgs Resources Marketing & Business About Enbridge Our Community Projects Development Client Management Application Interest & Work Links Groups Support & Bookmarks Resources As even this small sample shows, some navigation categories -- such as "About X" and human resources (HR) -- are fairly common on intranets. For a bigger sample, see our analysis of 77 intranets' information architecture (IA). On the other hand, there are also many notable differences. For example, only a consulting company would have a top-level menu for "Client management." And an "Interests" category is more suited to a science-based organization like JPL than many more mundane organizations. The point is that even this very basic design choice is determined by the organization's nature. Examining more detailed aspects of intranet design reveals further differences. For example, most intranets have an employee directory, but the criteria used to find employees differ dramatically. Knowledge-intensive organizations often emphasize the ability to find colleagues by their expertise, whereas other types of organizations might deem other attributes more important. Similarly, the information displayed on individual employee profile pages is not just industry-dependent, but also varies dramatically depending on company culture. Clearly, there are myriad design choices left, even after a company chooses a platform such as SharePoint. And these choices can have a huge impact on employee productivity and the intranet's success. In fact, the easier it gets to build the intranet's basic infrastructure, the more important it becomes to populate it with the most useful features possible and to create efficient user interfaces for those features. Intranets of the future might require less programming work, but they'll surely need even more user experience work. * Share: * * * * Share this article: * Twitter | * LinkedIn | * Email * Share this article: * Twitter * LinkedIn * Email About the Author Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a User Advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group which he co-founded with Dr. Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer). Dr. Nielsen established the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use. Subscribe to our Alertbox E-Mail Newsletter: The latest articles about interface usability, website design, and UX research from the Nielsen Norman Group. Subscribe Learn More Articles * Intranet & Enterprise Design: Study Guide * User-Centered Intranet Redesign: Set Up for Success in 11 Steps * COVID-19 Content on Your Intranet * The Top Enduring Intranet-Design Mistakes: 7 Deadly Sins * Top 10 Intranet Trends of 2016 Research Reports * Intranet Design Annual: 2020 * Intranet Design Annual: 2019 * Best SharePoint Intranets 2018-2022 * Intranet Usability Guidelines: Findings from User Testing of 42 Intranets * Intranet Portals: UX Design Experience from Real-Life Projects 1-Hour Talks * Mobile-First Intranet at Scale: Loblaw's Design Process * Design Thinking in the Digital Workplace * Top Intranet Design Trends of 2019 * Search and Findability * Digital Workplace Transformation Learn More Subscribe to the weekly newsletter to get notified about future articles. Articles * Intranet & Enterprise Design: Study Guide * User-Centered Intranet Redesign: Set Up for Success in 11 Steps * COVID-19 Content on Your Intranet * The Top Enduring Intranet-Design Mistakes: 7 Deadly Sins * Top 10 Intranet Trends of 2016 Research Reports * Intranet Design Annual: 2020 * Intranet Design Annual: 2019 * Best SharePoint Intranets 2018-2022 * Intranet Usability Guidelines: Findings from User Testing of 42 Intranets * Intranet Portals: UX Design Experience from Real-Life Projects 1-Hour Talks * Mobile-First Intranet at Scale: Loblaw's Design Process * Design Thinking in the Digital Workplace * Top Intranet Design Trends of 2019 * Search and Findability * Digital Workplace Transformation Articles * Intranet & Enterprise Design: Study Guide * User-Centered Intranet Redesign: Set Up for Success in 11 Steps * COVID-19 Content on Your Intranet * The Top Enduring Intranet-Design Mistakes: 7 Deadly Sins * Top 10 Intranet Trends of 2016 Research Reports * Intranet Design Annual: 2020 * Intranet Design Annual: 2019 * Best SharePoint Intranets 2018-2022 * Intranet Usability Guidelines: Findings from User Testing of 42 Intranets * Intranet Portals: UX Design Experience from Real-Life Projects 1-Hour Talks * Mobile-First Intranet at Scale: Loblaw's Design Process * Design Thinking in the Digital Workplace * Top Intranet Design Trends of 2019 * Search and Findability * Digital Workplace Transformation Videos * [Intranet_V] Intranet Vision 3 minute video * [10_Best_In] 10 Best Intranets of 2020 4 minute video * [10_interne] 10 Things Executives Should Know About Intranets 6 minute video * [Industries] Industries Impacted Most by UX (Jakob Nielsen) 4 minute video Popular Topics * Agile & Lean UX * Application Design * Design Process * Ecommerce Design * Eyetracking * Information Architecture * Interaction Design * Intranet Design * Mobile & Tablet Design * Persuasive Design * Research Methods * Study Guides * User Testing * UX Teams * Web Usability * Writing & Content About * Contact information * About Us * Why NN/g? * Return Policy * Cookie Declaration * Privacy Policy Follow us * Subscribe to Our Newsletter * Follow NN/g on Twitter * Subscribe to Our RSS Feed * Listen to the NN/g Podcast * Visit Don Norman's Website www.jnd.org * Visit Tog's Website www.asktog.com Copyright (c) 1998-2022 Nielsen Norman Group, All Rights Reserved. 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