North Tyneside One-man Band among Nielsen Norman Group 10 Best Intranets

In its third annual contest to identify the year's 10 best intranet designs, Nielsen Norman Group awarded a slot to North Tyneside College, the work of a single person.

'We saw outstanding intranets from companies with large intranet teams and budgets, and we also saw one from an amazing one-man shop at North Tyneside College, proving that good intranets depend more on will, talent, clarity of mission and commitment to usability than on having lavish funding,' said Kara Pernice Coyne, director of research for the group.

The winning intranets all illustrate a shift from the view of intranets as mainly document repositories to that of being truly useful work-support tools designed to meet the needs of users. The result of the shift is increased intranet usage. This year's outstanding intranet redesigns achieved an increase in use anywhere from 47% to 1,500%.

'This is definitely the "year of the user" for intranet design. It used to be that intranets were organised around the way documents were produced-which usually follows a company's department structure-rather than how people actually use the documents and the intranet,' said usability expert Jakob Nielsen, NNg principal. 'This year, our winning intranets all took a clear, user-centred approach to design.'

Most of the winning intranets were from large organisations with tens of thousands of employees; three were from small consulting companies. The whole list is (in alphabetical order): Amadeus Global Travel Distribution, Spain; ChevronTexaco; Design Matters, Inc., a Web design agency; FIGG Engineering Group, a consultancy specialising in bridges; Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Germany; Landor Associates, a brand strategy consultancy; Mayo Clinic, a non-profit medical centre; North Tyneside College,
U.K.; United States Coast Guard; Wachovia Corporation, the 5th largest bank in the United States.

Common themes across several of the top 10 intranets include the following:
* Email reduction: Several intranets had an explicit goal of reducing the amount of email, and to replace it in areas such as the circulation of attachments.
* Workflow support: The trend is to have information come to the user as required for a task, compared to having it sit in places where users have to go to find it when they need it.
* Self-service content management: The winning intranets recognised the importance of providing simple tools to employees for adding and maintaining content. The more people are able to take care of their own content creation, the more up-to-date the content will be.

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