Intranets best practices brands

Question

I'm working on an intranet's audit and I would like to gather some insights about the best practices on this type of platform. For that, I need to talk to users that are willing to share their experience about their company's intranet. So, as you guess, this is a little bit tricky. Do you know where I can find these datas or some studies with well-known brand examples. If there are some screens it will be great ! Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

You shouldn't treat the intranet that much differently (How do approaches for UX differ between intranets and normal websites?), in the sense that they serve as a service/product like any other websites or applications might, so you have to understand the users and use cases if you want to come up with the optimal solution.

Probably the most common issue with intranets is having to deal with sub-brands (usually because of different departments or teams) and how to manage them within the constraints of a third-party platform (e.g. SharePoint).

I don't think you'll find a lot of companies talking about their intranet design because it is not meant to be seen by external people. You can pick up hints about some of the challenges involved, but all the usual best practices for UX research and design applies so you shouldn't really worry too much about that until you have done the research.

Answer 2

Intranet is heavily driven by the type of users in the organization. Because it is internal, accessibility is not always a high priority. The book mentioned in the comments - Inranet Manual – is a very good resource in the way that it talks about the intranet in some of the large firms worldwide. However, it is not free. As Michael has pointed out, it will be difficult to find data openly on the web because a good intranet may well be the secret to a successful organization and their culture. It is good to see those examples but that should not matter because no firm is the same or their people or the culture.