Intranet design 101

Intranet Design 101

Intranet Design: An introduction

It takes more than just technology to create a successful intranet. Good design is fundamental for making sure your employees will use the platform you've built. No matter how powerful, polished, or slick your platform is, you won’t receive any benefits from your efforts without user adoption.

A successful intranet design weaves in elements that reflect the true identity of your organization, culture, and people, yet gives your users a tangible, useful tool that empowers them to do their best work.

Before we take you through our favourite intranet designs from well-known brands, we'll start by sharing ten best practices for world-class intranet design.

Podcast

Designing employee experience

With the Nielsen Norman Group announcing that an unprecedented four Unily intranets feature in their 10 best intranets of 2021, episode 7 of the Unily podcast discusses all things design. Paul Seda is joined by returning star Senior Consultant Alex Gabelli, and two newcomers – Product Manager Katie Johnson and Senior UI Developer Lewis Munt – to share their thoughts about designing the best employee experience.

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Designing an intranet: Marrying the left and right sides of the brain

Before we get started, we need to clarify one important matter. Most people hear the word design and immediately think of the creative side of the process, such as sketches, drafts, wireframes, layouts, and so on. This assumption minimizes the importance of critical thinking and a rational, step-by-step approach to the digital employee experience design.

When designing an intranet, the user, or employee experience, needs to be at the forefront of it all. Specialized tools and deep integrations become meaningless if employees struggle to navigate your intranet.

Enterprise-grade intranet design requires equal parts creativity and logical thinking. Science and and art meet to produce employee experiences that are as useful as they are engaging.

At Unily, we aim to give you the full extent of our knowledge when it comes to designing a successful and engaging digital employee experience. That starts here with this deep dive covering intranet design principles.

Ten core principles for designing a world-class intranet

The ten design heuristics we use today as user experience gospel were first developed by Nielsen Norman Group’s Jakob Nielsen in 1994, when the user experience of websites on the still-fledgling internet was not as sleek as what is on offer today. Since then, various consultancies and advisory firms have further contributed to the field. Renowned firms like Gartner, Forrester, and Gallup all regularly release studies and research that shape what we know about user experience.

The ten principles we're left with after years of study and experience in the field of usability engineering have become something of a rule of thumb for human-computer interaction. These rules save development and design teams time, with a checklist for early usability testing, so they can direct focus to more meaningful elements of your design.

Below are ten intranet design principles adapted to specifically cater to your enterprise’s digital workplace, alongside key tips and examples you can use to elevate your employee experience.

#1. Visibility and findability

"Findability precedes usability; in the alphabet and on the Web. You can't use what you can't find."

Peter Morville - Semantic Studios

Your employees should always know where they are and where they’re going when using your platform. Clear signposting, easy access to your site’s navigation menu, and optimized, logical pathways all help users efficiently navigate your intranet.

A perfect example of this can be seen in the “You are here” markers you find on maps, which immediately communicate where people are within their surroundings, and which way they should go next.

To translate this to your intranet, you should focus your efforts on providing a clear and concise navigation bar, making your sites and resources easily findable; don’t bury them underneath a thousand sub-sections.

Search flout

#2. Draw inspiration from the real world

"Systems should speak the users' language with words, phrases, and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order."

Jakob Nielsen - Nielsen Norman Group

UX writing is a crucial but historically overlooked factor in intranet design. Businesses need to consider the language they use on their platform to prevent a disconnect between our work platforms and the technology we use in our everyday lives.

Make sure that the language you’re using across your employee experience platform is common sense - employees shouldn’t have to learn new terminology to use your intranet. A real-world example is using universal icons to depict certain functions, like the power button, so users immediately understand how to operate it.

For your intranet, this means calling a spade a spade: don’t stray too far from the language and features that we expect as standard.

On-demand

Designing an award-winning intranet

Take an exclusive look at the world's best intranets of 2021 as selected by Nielsen Norman Group. As the first company to win four best intranet awards, discover what it takes to design an award-winning employee experience platform and get your questions answered by the teams that make it happen.

Watch on-demand

#3. Give users freedom

"Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked 'emergency exit' to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo."

Jakob Nielsen - Nielsen Norman Group

Mistakes happen, so building ways of undoing and editing actions into your design is a must. When users can’t easily navigate and control their interactions with your platform, they rely more heavily on training and support, as they lack the freedom of control to be efficient.

In the real world, we see this every day in the form of clearly marked entrances and exits. Or for another example, try to imagine for a moment how difficult it would be to navigate the internet if our browsers didn’t have back, forward, and refresh functions.

#4. Consistency is key

"Ensure visual design is consistent and conforms to user expectations."

-

Jakob's Law states that people spend the majority of their time using countless other digital products, not yours. People’s user experiences with those other products set a standard of expectations that trickle down and apply to the digital employee experiences you deliver, too.

A lack of consistency across your platform increases the cognitive load placed on users. This is because they must decode and translate your design into the common language they’ve come to expect from digital experiences.

Design for the patterns and workflows your users are accustomed to. Site navigation, branding and theming, and the overall look and feel of your employee experience platform must align to deliver a consistent user experience. As well as your general aesthetics – fonts, styles, and colors – this also applies to your integrations and third-party tools, as a single pane of glass view of the entire digital workplace builds synergy and boosts efficiency.

Apps and Tools

#5. Prepare for failure

"Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action."

Jakob Nielsen - Nielsen Norman Group

Remember that old saying, ‘failure to prepare is preparing to fail’? Well, it’s not just a catchy phrase, it also applies to your intranet design. How-to guides, step-by-step instructions, asking users for confirmation before acting on requests, and speaking in plain, easily understandable language are all steps you can take to reduce errors and ensure users aren’t lost on your platform.

Employees working together to design an award winning intranet

Blog

Designing an award-winning intranet: 6 key takeaways

As the first company to win four best intranet awards from the Nielsen Norman Group this year, we invited two of our award-winning clients to join us for an hour-long webinar, where they discussed how to design an award-winning employee experience platform. Here are the 6 key takeaways from the session.

Learn more

#6. Cognition, not recognition

"Ease of use may be invisible, but its absence sure isn't"

- IBM

Always provide instructions and context to the user’s actions. Playing into the previous two rules, when we talk about intuitive design and the familiarity of your platform what we refer to is the ability to pick up and use it from the get-go.

Play into what your users are used to and take away a lot of their cognitive load by:

  • Signposting your intranet navigation
  • Clearly showing where resources are stored
  • Using clean and direct design

'Dynacare enhance patient care with an award-winning healthcare intranet' Guide front cover

Case Study

Dynacare: enhancing patient care with an award-winning healthcare intranet

For Canada’s largest and most established health solutions company, specialist knowledge is Dynacare’s lifeblood. Following a rebrand, the enterprise unveiled a collaboration-focused intranet that would underpin ambitious growth plans, enhance patient care, and even earn a spot among Nielsen Norman’s best intranets.

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#7. Agile and flexible

"Accelerators - unseen by the novice user - may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperience and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions."

Jakob Nielsen - Nielsen Norman Group

They say never to cut corners if you want a job done right. Well, intranet user experience design may be the only time you're encouraged to take shortcuts - there’s even a name for it. The kind of shortcuts we're talking about are typically called accelerators.

Accelerators help employees tailor the user experience to their needs. Whether that’s with a configurable app and tools menu or a favorite links section to help people find things quicker, accelerators keep your platform agile and flexible to the wants and needs of your users.

Productivity

#8. Less is more

"Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple."

C.W. Ceram -

Minimalist web design has certainly become a dominating trend in today's world. A cursory glance at any web development agency's website can confirm as much.

While your intranet software shouldn't be a blank slate, you need to be wary of bombarding users with too much information on one page. Identify areas where you can keep text concise and cut down on clutter.

'Biogen transforms enterprise corporate communications and collaboration' case study flat pages

Case Study

Biogen transforms enterprise corporate communications and collaboration

Biogen keeps patients and physicians front and center in its daily work. With more than 7k employees across 40 countries all working together to research and develop medicines to transform neuroscience, collaboration truly lies at the heart of the company. Biogen sought to evolve their intranet into an employee experience platform that would encompass the tools and collaboration means to provide an unparalleled ability to further medical science.

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#9. Smooth over bumps in the road

"A problem well stated is a problem half solved."

Charles Kettering -

You must give feedback when users attempt to complete a process on your intranet but make mistakes that result in errors. The first step to solving a problem is to clarify it - only then can you propose a solution.

By clearly showing users the error in their actions and directing them to solutions, you're not only making your platform easier to use, but you're also actively encouraging users to learn more about the intranet and the things they can achieve with it.

'Commonwealth Care Alliance: Launching an award-winning healthcare intranet' case study flat pages

Case Study

Commonwealth Care Alliance: Launching an award-winning healthcare intranet

People are at the heart of Commonwealth Care Alliance’s mission. More than 40k members turn to the not-for-profit organization for their healthcare needs. By launching an intranet that is accessible on-demand from anywhere, Commonwealth Care Alliance has created a winning experience for their people that has earned international award recognition from the Nielsen Norman Group.

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#10. Keep help at hand

"Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the users' task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large."

Jakob Nielsen - Nielsen Norman Group

Employee experience platforms aim to deliver intuitive user experiences that empower people, but even the most advanced technology is still prone to the occasional bad day. When all else fails, users should know where they can go to easily access help or guidance.

Training, documentation, and contacts that employees can turn to when they're stuck should be not only available, but also easy to find, either with a dedicated help site or via frequently asked questions forums.

Training

Intranet design showcase

Over the years, Unily clients have been consistently recognized for outstanding intranet design. The Nielsen Norman Group's Intranet Design Annual is the gold standard for intranet design resources. Every year the group identify the top ten intranets from around the world and pull them together into an annual with commentary about why the designs stand out from the crowd.

Unily customers have won many times over the years and we are the only intranet provider to have had four clients feature in one annual. Not only do we credit our success to the creativity of our customers, but also a testament to the high regard we pay to user experience in our product development.

In short, we know a thing or two about great intranet design. And our customers boast some of the best intranets worldwide.

The next part of this guide will be dedicated to giving you a sneak peek at some of the most impressively designed intranets the world over, complete with commentary from in-house design specialist to help you understand how different organizations have approached the design process to bring about world-class results.

#1. Johnson & Johnson: Home

Industry: Pharmaceuticals

HQ: New Jersey, US

Employees: 135k+

As the world’s largest and most broad-based healthcare company, Johnson & Johnson’s 135k employees are blending heart, science, and ingenuity to profoundly change the trajectory of
health for humanity. For more than 130 years, Johnson & Johnson has been providing medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and consumer health products to communities around the globe.

As part of a winder digital transformation strategy, Johnson & Johnson partnered with Unily to create Home, an award-winning employee experience platform. Home was selected by the Nielsen Norman Group as one of the ten best intranets in 2021.

Home surpasses the traditional boundaries of an intranet and serves as a comprehensive people experience platform within the company's digital workplace ecosystem. Acting as the central hub for global communications, Home goes beyond that role by functioning as a trusted enterprise search engine and offering a personalized employee dashboard. This dashboard integrates seamlessly with other digital systems such as Workday (HR), Cornerstone (Learning), Service Now (IT Support), and Salesforce (Case Management), enhancing employee productivity.

Considered a one-stop shop, Home serves as a launching point for employees to effortlessly find information and access various destinations within the digital workplace. Johnson & Johnson has diligently provided employees with essential yet enhanced features like search capabilities, relevant content, and easily accessible links. These enhancements have significantly contributed to creating a more efficient and effective workforce.

The design process for each new product or feature on Home adopts an employee-centric approach, starting with identifying real-world challenges or problems faced by employees. By gaining a deep understanding of these issues, the team at Johnson & Johnson ensures that the solutions they develop truly address employee pain points. This approach also enables the team to establish key success measures, allowing them to track and evaluate the effectiveness of their designed solutions over time.

Johnson & Johnson homepage

"Johnson & Johnson’s new platform allowed the team to rapidly respond to changing business needs amid the pandemic. The team was able to adjust the layout of the main page to highlight key COVID-19 links and information in less than five weeks. On their old platform, this task would have taken months."

Kara Pernice - Senior Vice President at Nielsen Norman Group
Johnson and Johnson news stories
On-demand

Unite 21 - Shaping the future of work with Johnson & Johnson

Discover how Johnson & Johnson, the world’s largest and most broadly-based healthcare company, is shaping the future of work for 150k+ employees based across 90+ countries with an employee experience platform that unites people, tools, and knowledge in one place.

Watch on-demand

#2. The Estée Lauder Companies: My ELC

Industry: Retail

HQ: New York, US

Employees: 48k+

The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. (ELC) is one of the world’s leading manufacturers and marketers of quality skin care, makeup, fragrance, and hair care products. The company’s products are sold in approximately 150 countries and territories under various household brand names. 

ELC employs a wide range of people, from retail to supply chain, in-field, manufacturing,
consultants, and corporate employees, all supporting different brands, regions, and departments.
Having such a large workforce means there are a wide variety of use cases for each user, so the
MyELC needed to be able to fulfill these demands. To achieve the organization's vision of creating a one-stop-shop for employees to access everything they need to succeed at work, MyELC leans into personalization, targeting and accessibility features to ensure every user receives an experience tailored to their specific needs. 

MyELC was chosen by the Nielsen Norman Group as one of the ten best intranets of 2022. Since its launch, the platform has garnered more than 2.4 million views, with the audience growing consistently month over month and most employees reacting to or commenting on content.

MyELC offers a targeted and personalized homepage for employees, where they can find the information and resources that are most relevant to them. This includes news, tips on how to use the platform, the latest job opportunities, answers to FAQs, and more. The design of MyELC leans into editorial principles to create a 'digital magazine' that looks as good as it is functional.

"It’s essential that employees are supported with the best technology to inspire and enable their work across brands, regions and functions. Our Unily digital workplace elevates a personalized employee experience and fosters our strong, inclusive culture that ensures every employee is engaged. "

Kerry O’Donnell - Executive Director, Information Technology at The Estée Lauder Companies
ELC on mobile

A global newsroom to unite a complex multi-region and multi-brand workforce

MyELC is a shining example of a modern employee newsroom; a central hub that connects employees to the stories and insights that bring meaning to work. The goal of the platform is to enhance employee engagement through the delivery of inspiring communications experiences. The homepage sets the tone with a focus on promoting relevant content using targeting to display insights that meet individual user preferences. The use of global news widgets and personalized feeds deliver targeted company news with the right balance of global and local content.

Classic, engaging design

Through consistent and considered design, MyELC reflects the beauty enterprise’s established brand, creating a sense of familiarity for employees. A minimal color palette and bespoke typography deliver a user experience that is both easy to navigate, and feels like an extension of the brand. The result is an internal newsroom experience that gives employees access to the same grade of communications enjoyed by consumers around the world.

"I know where I am because the way they brand MyELC is the way they brand everything; it’s The Estée Lauder Companies experience. Even if you took the name off of everything on this platform, I’d still know it was The Estée Lauder Companies. It’s something we can all learn from – take key elements of your branding and weave it in. It’s subtle, but hugely successful branding."

Alex Gabelli - Senior Consultant at Unily
Case Study

The Estée Lauder Companies: Designing the world's best intranet

Discover how The Estée Lauder Companies is transforming employee experience and internal communications for 60k+ global employees with Unily's employee experience platform. Get an exclusive look inside the world's best intranet of 2022 and learn why MyELC made history as the first-ever beauty company intranet to feature in the Nielsen Norman Group's Intranet Design Annual.

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#3. CVS Health: Heartbeat

Industry: Retail

HQ: Rhode Island, US 

Employees: 300k+

CVS Health’s acquisition of Aetna was the biggest health care merger in U.S. history. As an important part of the integration work that followed, the company was faced with the challenge of replacing two large legacy intranet sites with a single digital platform for 300k employees.

The enterprise sought to create a unified digital workplace that would address the unique needs of employees from diverse lines of business, helping to demystify a complex organizational structure and align all colleagues against the purpose and culture of the company. Recognizing Unily’s experience partnering with complex, global organizations to unify workforces, CVS health chose to partner with Unily to bring their digital employee experience vision to life.

The new platform, Heartbeat, is designed to connect CVS’s diverse workforce with everything they need to succeed at work, be that company communications, internal knowledge, subject experts or productivity apps and tools. The platform leverages Unily’s targeting and personalization features to deliver a relevant experience to every employee, surfacing the news, information and resources they need to do their best work.

In 2023, Heartbeat was recognized as the world's best intranet by Ragan Communications.

CVS Health's Intranet Homepage

"Heartbeat is helping build a culture of trust, transparency, and positivity across the organization, and has become a central tool for colleagues to use daily."

April Jaconski - Director of Enterprise Communications at CVS Health

#4. British Airways: One

Industry: Travel & Transport

HQ: London, UK

Employees: 44k+

British Airways (BA) is the flagship airline of the United Kingdom. BA marked their 100th year of service by launching “One”, a new mobile colleague platform, to their 44k global employees in just eight weeks.

Bespoke mobile experiences

One supports BA’s global workforce to connect, engage and share ideas with social feeds, personalized features and targeted news, and their native video channel, BA:TV, all from the Unily mobile app.

BA and Unily have created unique digital experiences for staff that react to the location and role of each user. For example, pilots and cabin crew logging into One from a staff lounge prior to flights are greeted by a bespoke site full of key resources.

Connecting the disconnected

With almost their entire workforce regularly in transit, reaching colleagues with communications can be difficult. BA pushes their users towards offline reading, which provides the ability to save content for later, powering engagement without limits.

“Unily’s offline reading functionality has been revolutionary,” adds Den Carter. “Because we use the targeted and personalized Communications Homepage from the Feature Store, our colleagues can instantly download all their unread content to their reading library with a single tap.”

"85% of colleagues access our digital workplace via smartphone, so we flipped the concept of designing responsive sites on its head. Most UI designers create an experience for desktop and then make it responsive to mobile, but we instead focus all of our attention on the mobile experience, and then make it responsive to desktop. "

Den Carter - Head of Channels and Content at British Airways
BA frontline

#5. Baker Hughes: MyBakerHughes

Industry: Energy

HQ: Texas, US

Employees: 55k+

MyBakerHughes was launched in the midst of a global pandemic. The intranet was intended to support Baker Hughes as they underwent significant business change as part of a de-merger, but priorities quickly shifted when mass work-from-home kicked in leading to an urgent need for a crisis response portal.

Despite challenging circumstances, MyBakerHughes' strategic design earned the intranet a spot in Nielsen Norman's 2021 Intranet Designs Annual. The group were impressed by the intranet's mobile-responsive design, considered use of customizations, and excellent attention to content standards and governance.

During the first 24 hours post-launch, Baker Hughes saw over ten times the average visits of its previous intranet, a testament to the user-friendly design of the platform.

MyBakerHughes homepage design promotes employee productivity by prioritizing quick, personalized access to critical items that help employees find what they need quickly. An apps and tools carrousel gives employees one-click access to their most-used third-party applications, while a 'My Tasks' widget rolls up news stories that require the user to take action. 

Alex Gabelli, Senior Consultant at Unily, notes that MyBakerHughes puts more general information at the top of the page and then introduces more personalized content further down, a best practice of intranet design. 

"Our new intranet, MyBakerHughes, has revolutionized the way we communicate with our employees. Our employees now have a central communications hub where they can learn about our company, access resources, and collaborate with their colleagues. It has provided a world-class experience that enables us to build our culture and drive change."

Stephanie Hartgrove - VP Global Communications at Baker Hughes
Baker Hughes homepage

#6. Commonwealth Care Alliance: CommonGround

Industry: Healthcare

HQ: Massachusetts, US

Employees: 1.5k+

Commonwealth Care Alliance, a non-profit healthcare organization deeply rooted in the community, is dedicated to enhancing the well-being of individuals with significant needs through innovative, coordinated, and exceptional patient care. At the heart of their expanding digital workplace lies CommonGround, a fitting name for their intranet.

CommonGround serves as a centralized hub, offering employees access to a diverse array of vital resources and information pertaining to departments, colleagues, and internal communications. It grants them the ability to utilize various applications, access document libraries, participate in executive-led broadcasts, attend manager webinars, and much more.

This cloud-based and mobile-responsive intranet empowers employees to connect with CommonGround wherever they are, be it in the clinic, office, or even at home. Regardless of their location, CommonGround is there to support their caregiving endeavors. The design of this intranet was meticulously crafted, drawing upon industry-standard design principles and proven research methodologies. Furthermore, it seamlessly integrates the organization's spirit and values, ensuring that the intranet fosters a sense of value, attentiveness, and full engagement in the company's mission for every member of the workforce.

Common Ground was selected by the Nielsen Norman Group as one of the ten best intranets of 2021. 

"Our objective in launching a best-in-class intranet for our workforce was to be steadfast in advancing our technology for stronger communication, community building, and efficient access to job-specific resources."

Courtney Sullivan Murphy - Chief Operating Officer & Executive Sponsor at Commonwealth Care Alliance
CCA homepage

#7. Cathay Pacific: The Hub

Industry: Travel and transport

HQ: Chek Lap Kok, Hong Kong

Employees: 20k+

Cathay Pacific serves as the flagship airline of Hong Kong. With it's large, diverse, and predominantly frontline workforce, Cathay Pacific envisioned an inclusive intranet that would provide simple access to everything employees needed to stay informed and productive from any device. To achieve this, the team devised a fully mobile-responsive intranet complete with branded mobile application, specifically tailored to enable cabin crew members to access the intranet effortlessly while on the move and seamlessly navigate between various work applications within the Cathay Pacific network. Personalization is a key theme of The Hub, which leverages targeted homepage variants to deliver bespoke experiences to employees from different regions and functions.

Depending on an employee's role within the organization - whether stationed at outports (airports around the world), the central office, or part of the inflight team - a customized version of the homepage is presented, catering to the diverse needs of the Cathay Pacific workforce. Careful consideration and user feedback resulted in the creation of eight distinct versions of the homepage. For corporate office staff, the homepage highlights the latest business news and initiatives, while inflight service teams are greeted with an embedded roster and message inbox, accompanied by prominent cabin crew updates. This personalized approach ensures that regardless of their role or location, employees find the intranet's homepage to be a valuable and efficient tool.

Although content and layout may differ, the primary navigation remains consistent, guaranteeing that all employees can access available content within the information architecture in a uniform manner.

Kaz Hassan, Product Manager at Unily, points to the simplicity of the design used in The Hub: “Cathay Pacific’s choice of color scheme and imagery is simple. The result of this type of design is a very modern UX that puts the users first, and that’s what wins awards.”

"With personalized and interesting content, alerts, and notifications, it has become a platform from which we host all of our key business apps and tools in one place. It has provided a brand-enhancing addition to our employee experience and become the primary vehicle for all internal communications."

Carly Nankin - Head of Internal Communications & Engagement at Cathay Pacific
Cathay Pacific mobile phones

#8. Crayola: Crayola Connect

Industry: Manufacturing

HQ: Pennsylvania, US

Employees: 2k+

Crayola is the world-renowned manufacturer of art supplies, most famous for its crayons with which the Crayola name has become synonymous. Crayola partnered with Unily to develop an employee platform that would drive connectivity and innovation from head office to factory floor.

A digital home for a unique culture

Unifying their dispersed workforce, the Crayola Connect intranet serves as the digital home for Crayola’s impassioned culture, arming employees with the tools needed to collaborate, innovate, and do their best work.

The Crayola Connect homepage gives employees everything they need to unlock performance, providing streamlined access to tools, sites and content, all while staying faithful to the whimsical branding that helps deliver the digital experiences Crayola employees expect.

Embodying the brand

The design of Crayola Connect closely mirrors the classic Crayola branding, using the same shades of green from their product packaging and colors and fonts used on their consumer-facing website to draw parallels between the platform and the business.

Its electric color palette and consistent branding combine to deliver a platform that strongly reflects Crayola’s unique identity. Its bright imagery and playful design adds a creative flair to a homepage focused on delivering engaging internal communications and streamlined access to key applications and tools.

"Our goal was to make sure company news, events and videos were easy to find and accessible to all employees. Our navigation is based on employee feedback about what information and content they wanted to find on the homepage of the intranet."

Karen Kelly - Executive Communications & Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Manager at Crayola
Crayola on mobile
Crayola home
On-demand

Unite 21 - Reimagining the employee experience: from in-person to intranet with Crayola

Find out how the makers of the world’s best-loved crayons and markers are leveraging their creative culture and digital channels to remain agile in a changing workplace.

Watch on-demand

Key takeaways: the pillars of engaging intranet design

Now you've seen what world-class intranet design looks like, how can you start to bring some of these principles into your own digital employee experience design? There are common threads we see at play in each of our designs that elevate the employee experience and help drive adoption and engagement - here are our top five takeaways.

#1. Design that embodies your organization

The first key insight we can draw from the range of examples in this guide is something that each and every one of our featured designs addresses in some way, with various different approaches. Looking through the strategic objectives, business missions, and visions of the clients featured, one thing that consistently appeared was the need for our employee experience platforms to embody the culture and values of the wider organization.

From your platform’s color scheme, theming and branding to the language you use and the stories you share, conveying your organization’s identity through design is a priority for modern enterprises and employees alike. Spotlight the conversations and connections happening across your business through design; the social side, the human side, the culture- building, it all needs to be represented.

In all of our designs, we can see value placed on connecting people to each other and everything happening across your business through content. Images featuring employees and people as their subject litter content feeds, as the content they’re producing aligns with their platforms’ aim to fully embody their organizational culture.

Employee spotlight page featuring an article and a form

#2. Draw inspiration from the outside world

Jakob Nielsen, otherwise known as “the guru of usability”, first coined Jakob’s Law in relation to consistent UX and consumer-grade technology.

Jakob’s Law states that people spend the majority of their time using countless other digital products not your specific technology. People’s user experiences with those other products set a standard of expectations, providing a baseline that users implicitly expect your digital employee experiences to meet as well.

For your intranet’s design, this means meeting user expectations by mirroring design elements from consumer technology. Don’t stray too far from the language and features we expect as standard from the tools and apps we use every day. Make sure that the language you’re using across your platform is common sense, because employees shouldn’t have to learn new terminology to use your intranet.

"The set of questions we ask in the design process has now changed. We’re more refined about those questions because our clients are refined; people’s expectations are higher because we’re consuming so much digital content and media in our lives, so when I turn to my work platform I need to understand the same messages. I don’t want to have to look at it differently."

Alex Gabelli - Senior Consultant at Unily

"From your platform’s color scheme, theming and branding to the language you use and the stories you share, conveying your organization’s identity through design is a priority for modern enterprises and employees alike."

-
Unily social feed with a notification at the top

#3. Design is for people, not looking pretty

When designing an employee experience platform, it can be surprisingly easy to get bogged down in the granular details. Deciding whether your social feed sits on the left or right side of the page can take longer than you’d think, especially when decisions must run through various stakeholders and decision makers.

If you’re tailoring your design to suit your users’ needs, the seemingly obvious but all-too-often overlooked step is to, first, identify these needs. Any one person within your business cannot be expected to predict every use case for your platform or anticipate the pain points and needs of your entire user base. It’s for this reason that gathering a comprehensive group of stakeholders that represent the interests of every corner of your workforce is a crucial step in any design process.

With the right people in the room, key decisions and typically cumbersome approval processes are streamlined, allowing you to focus on the actual design of your platform and avoid any bureaucracy stymying the creative process.

"Those touchpoints are now the same and that sort of wayfinding is the same because we need design to match. In the old days you wanted it to pop and stand out, but now it’s about predicting behavior and fitting the assumptions your users are making about what they’ll experience when they land on your platform."

Alex Gabelli - Senior Consultant at Unily
Employee exurvey pop out

#4. Search and findability

People often equate findability to search functions, but in actual fact there are some key differences between the two. 

When we talk about findability in the context of UX, what we’re really asking is how easily can users find something on your platform? So that doesn’t just mean going straight to the search bar to find something, it also means asking how easily your users can immediately work out where on the page they’re supposed to go to for company news, or where their apps and tools can be accessed. A well-designed employee experience platform makes information findable by clearly mapping out spaces and locations dedicated to certain functions, and utilizing clean, uncluttered design.

Delivering a seamless search experience is still extremely important, because when all else fails it’s there to help. Think of it as a last resort; it’s just as quick and easy to search for something, but ideally you want your platform’s design to be so easy to pick up and use that your employees can immediately figure out where they need to go to find everything they need.

"People use the term ‘findable’ with search features, but what findable really means is ‘can I even find the place to search?’ What am I finding when I just look at the page? It’s the idea that information is findable because it’s right there: Explicit. Intuitive. I’ve got my comms right there. I know where to go for my tools. And then if I can’t find it, I can easily search for it – three different optimal pathways to the same result."

Kaz Hassan - Product Manager at Unily
Unily homepage featuring search, apps and tools and rollups

#5. Language and design go hand-in-hand

Finally, the last piece of inspiration we’re taking from our featured designs is to consider language and UX writing. All of our designs provide excellent examples of how to cut through the noise and grab the user’s attention with wording.

By naming their content widgets “Notifications” or pulling the most recent updates into a targeted “Happening Now” feed, these enterprises have all created a reason for employees to keep coming back to the intranet. It’s almost like Twitter, where you’re essentially plugging into a live feed of news and events from around the world in real-time.

That constant feedback loop of coming back to certain channels for content is manufacturing a sense of urgency through UX writing. Calling something a notification is more immediate and grabbing than simply calling it content, so by manufacturing urgency, you’re creating engagement where previously there wasn’t any. It’s these little design opportunities to connect with users that can really elevate a platform.

"Instead of calling your latest content ‘news’, you say it’s ‘happening now’, you send a push notification to people’s phones and shout ‘look over here!’. That’s a whole different interpretation for the user than just calling it content or just calling it an article."

Alex Gabelli - Senior Consultant at Unily
Targeted content on mobile

Inspiring intranet design starts here

As you will have seen throughout this guide, intranet design comes in many flavors and there isn’t an exact science to it. Every business is different, and while the intranets you’ve seen may have some of the same core fundamentals, each is unique to that enterprise.

The Unily experts highlight throughout that to have a great design is primarily about having a deep understanding of the business itself. The needs of the organization, the culture they have in place, and the primary focus areas all come together to determine what the final product will look like.

When you work with an experienced team to design and curate your intranet, you can really bring everything to life so that your platform truly represents your enterprise. It becomes instantly recognizable to your employees, giving them a sense of unity and a visual representation of the company culture.

Ultimately, intranet design is about elevating the employee experience to a level that not only drives adoption, but results in extraordinary levels of engagement.

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