Summary: Hero images, carousels, fat footers, video, minimalist design, and responsive navigation, are among some of the top feature trends of the best intranets of 2016. We even see a revival of online help that’s actually helpful to employees exploring new features or attempting complex tasks.
Each winning intranet has its own style, feature set, and personality, unique and special in its own way. But, great minds do think alike, and some themes and features are common in multiple or all of the winning intranets in our Intranet Design Annual 2016.
The 10 best-designed intranets for 2016 may be leading-edge cases, but the trends in their design should spread to more mainstream intranets in the next few years. Although every intranet feature won’t work well at every organization, feature trends from outstanding intranets can inspire your intranet redesign. Stay ahead of the curve and consider taking on some of the following intranet design trends now:
- Help and tutorials
- Simple, minimalist-looking design
- Better photos
- Search evolution
- Carousels and heroes
- Fat footers
- Left-side navigation
- Social features targeted at particular topics or groups
- Video
- Business communication
In This Article:
- Help and Tutorials
- Simple, Minimalist-Looking Design
- Better Photos
- Search Evolution
- Carousels and Heroes
- Fat Footers
- Side Global Navigation
- Targeted Social
- Video
- Business Communication
- Conclusion
- Full Report
Help and Tutorials
After many years of being chastised for being unhelpful, online help went out of fashion. This was reinforced by the idea that an interface should stand on its own, and not need help to be usable. This year, however, we saw a resurgence of Help that is helpful. While the winning-intranets’ mostly employ nice-and-easy user interfaces, occasional more-involved or new interface elements do benefit from well-designed help. Help features can aid in discoverability of functionality, and expedite employees’ learning and understanding of the intranet and its capabilities.
At Intermountain Healthcare, employees who need a little assistance can refer to the Help section in the right rail. Similarly, The Co-operators provides thorough, wide-ranging guidance about how to make the most of its intranet.
Simple, Minimalist-Looking Design
The “flat and boxy” designs prevalent in years past are much less pronounced this year. Most of the designs, however, continue to boast a simple, sometimes minimalist, aesthetic.
Some designs, such as those from Enbridge; Repsol; and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, use generous white space.
Intermountain Healthcare, NAV CANADA, Swedish Parliament, and (to a lesser degree) American Cancer Society all use rectangles for a boxy, easy-to-scan design.
Better Photos
Whether it indicates a strong commitment to photography, more people sharing photos, or simply today’s better phone cameras, the photographs on the winning intranets are quite engaging. Photos typically relate strongly to the material they accompany and often show employees doing their work.
For example, the Enbridge site shows an employee evaluating a particular job site. DORMA shows two employees joking around.
Search Evolution
Intranet search is a lion that the best intranets tame. The evolution of search on this year’s winning sites is impressive.
To enhance its intranet search, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft consolidates data sources to produce a single point of entry to knowledge resources.
Salini Impregilo’s search, which appears on every page, allows employees to search the entire intranet for news, people, projects, and documents.
Carousels and Heroes
Although the carousel is still a prominent feature on winning intranets, the hero is making a comeback. Some organizations, such as NAV CANADA and Repsol, still opt for multiple images and statements in one area, while others, such as Salini Impregilo and Intermountain Healthcare prefer one hero image to make the desired statement.
Large footers at the bottom of pages became popular a few years ago and remain common today. Employees often know that the information they’re seeking is on the intranet, but they can’t always find it. When using a public-facing website, people may have the option to leave the site, and will. But employees often know that the intranet is the main source or the only place to turn to to find particular content.
Providing organized links at the bottom of pages provides employees with one more chance to locate what they need. The content in these footers can be arranged in many different ways:
- repeat the global navigation
- suggest related content
- present popular links
On the NAV CANADA intranet, the wide footer navigation repeats the global navigation topics and offers a list of the megamenu links.
The Enbridge footer includes links to the public sites of Enbridge companies and information for contacting the Enterprise Service Desk. It also lists Ethics and Conduct information, along with a reminder: “Let’s work together to maintain a respectful workplace.”
All of these visually use an obvious aesthetic element to indicate the footer; this element can be:
- colored background that is different from that of the rest of the page
- border (line) delineating the footer from the page content
- combination of the above
Side Global Navigation
Because mega menus don’t work in a phone UI, designers often use a mega menu for desktop navigation, and an accordion or some other option for mobile navigation. Some teams opt for menu UIs that translate easily from desktop to mobile. One such pattern popular this year is the vertical navigation bar down the left side of the page. The Swedish Parliament and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft are among the winning organizations that follow this navigation pattern.
Targeted Social
A great trend from past years continues this year: presenting social tools in an understandable, targeted way. Gone are the days of displaying a wall feed on the homepage or in personal profiles with no additional description or context. Great intranets use social features to encourage further communication about important or trending topics.
DORMA’s CEO participates in the social features, leading employees by example and playing a big role in the social features’ success. Two major company events occurred near the features’ launch; these events provided a source of content, increased interest, and natural momentum for success.
The Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft intranet lists recent hires and employee anniversaries on the homepage. Such seemingly simple features can go a long way toward building a sense of community and inclusiveness in an organization.
The Co-operators offers a variety of social features, including the weekly Five Minutes With… (an employee-profiles feature), polls, achievements, Popular Links, and the ability for users to submit news. Also, in the site’s executive blogs, senior leaders share their knowledge and opinions and ask employees to do the same.
The Trending Now section on the American Cancer Society intranet summarizes the site resources, search terms, and pages that receive the most traffic. This section is a simple and automated way to keep users informed of the site’s most popular items.
Enbridge employees can easily access the company’s public information on social sites — including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube — via links in the middle of the homepage. This section also includes a link to the @enbridge blog. Providing quick access to external sites raises employee awareness about information that Enbridge is sharing with the public and about the conversations occurring on social-media sites.
Video
Tools to create, edit, and post videos have made them accessible and easy to deal with. Prevalence in social channels has lowered the expectation for high-quality video production. In fact, many people welcome the simplicity and folksiness of more realistic, just-shot-myself type of videos. With these changes, individuals, teams, and even high-level managers are taking advantage of video and sharing information in this way.
Videos are often stored in their own section of the intranet, which allows employees to sort, filter, and search by topic. But videos, like written content, are also presented on the homepage, in news sections, and cross linked from related contend.
Business Communication
Business people have learned that the intranet is the perfect place to communicate their goals and statuses to all employees. This information helps employees realize how the organization is doing and motivates them to work toward and achieve organizational goals. It also adds a level of respect, signaling to all employees that they are important enough to know where the organization has set it sights, and that that each person can play positive a role in those plans.
Conclusion
Whether your organization is large or small; formal or informal; public, private or government; consider which of the trends here can be implemented, deployed, and used successfully on your intranet. Choose a few to do over the next year to enhance the user experience, andincrease the business value of your intranet.
Full Report
For more information about themes, intranet best practices, and full-color screenshots of the 10 winners, download the2016 Intranet Design Annual. The report download comes with a folder containing each image as a .png to make it possible to zoom in and study the designs in detail.
