Intranets Turn Web 2.0 Fads Into Sophisticated Features.Nielsen Norman Group Nielsen Norman Group is a usability consulting company created by well-known user experience experts Donald Norman, Jakob Nielsen, and Bruce Tognazzini. Besides these three principals, there are many lesser known experts in the company. The company was founded in 1998. Announces the 2007 World's 10 Best Intranets SAN FRANCISCO San Francisco (săn frănsĭs`kō), city (1990 pop. 723,959), coextensive with San Francisco co., W Calif., on the tip of a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, which are connected by the strait known as the Golden -- Intranets typically avoid the over-hyped fads that wash across the Web, according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. usability expert Jakob Nielsen, whose research firm Nielsen Norman Group today announced the winners of its seventh annual intranet design contest. This year, rather than avoid the Internet fads, including social networking and wikis See wiki. , intranet design teams applied them in restrained ways that emphasized useful information. The result was the addition of sophisticated intranet features that expressed each company's culture and served the needs of individual employees better than ever before. The world's 10 best intranets named in this year's contest provide numerous examples of the latest trends in intranet design and are each described in detail in Nielsen Norman Group's "Intranet Design Annual 2007: The Year's Ten Best Intranets," co-authored by Nielsen and colleagues Kara Kara (kär`ə), river, c.140 mi (230 km) long, NE European and NW Siberian Russia. It flows N from the N Urals into the Kara Sea, forming part of the traditional border between European and Asian Russia. It is navigable in its lower course. Pernice Coyne, director of research and Mathew Schwartz, researcher. "Websites often employ a trendy technology for its own sake rather than for any discernable benefit it affords the user. They shoot for glitz glitz Informal n. Ostentatious showiness; flashiness: "a garish barrage of show-biz glitz" Peter G. Davis. tr.v. ," said Jakob Nielsen, principal, Nielsen Norman Group. "This year, our intranet contest winners used the same trendy technologies, but they aimed instead for utility and pragmatism, and achieved them without any sacrifice to the coolness factor associated, for example, with an Ajax map that helps an employee find another employee with whom to carpool car·pool n. also car pool 1. An arrangement whereby several participants or their children travel together in one vehicle, the participants sharing the costs and often taking turns as the driver. 2. ." The 10 organizations with winning intranets are based in five different countries and have employee populations ranging in size from 1,500 to 383,000. In alphabetical order, they are: American Electric Power American Electric Power (NYSE: AEP) is a major investor-owner electric utility in various parts of the United States. It is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. It serves parts of 11 states, and is currently the largest electricity generating utility in the United States. (US); Comcast (US); DaimlerChrysler AG (Germany); The Dow Chemical Company The Dow Chemical Company (NYSE: DOW TYO: 4850 ) is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Midland, Michigan. Overview The Dow Chemical Company is currently the second largest chemical manufacturer in the World (after BASF)[1]. (US); Infosys Technologies Limited (India); JPMorgan Chase & Co. (US); Microsoft Corporation (US); National Geographic Society National Geographic Society U.S. scientific society founded in 1888 in Washington, D.C., by a small group of eminent explorers and scientists “for the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge. (US); The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) is a British charitable organisation which works to promote conservation and protection of birds and the wider environment through public awareness campaigns, petitions and through the operation of nature reserves (UK); Volvo Group (Sweden). "We saw much larger organizations, averaging 90,000 employees, taking the lead this year in intranet design. Creating a cohesive and useful intranet for this many people is no easy feat, but the good news is that we saw correspondingly larger intranet teams, as many as 20 people, which indicates increased commitment from upper-level management to intranets," said Kara Pernice Coyne, director of research, Nielsen Norman Group. "We've come a long way from the 'one IT employee posting the employee benefits PDF' days." Highlights from Nielsen Norman Group's 2007 Intranet Design Annual include: Personalization: Almost all of the winning intranets offered extensive personalization features to streamline information delivery and present the right material to the right person's intranet desktop at the right time. Improving work/life balance: Companies now include a substantial amount of information on their intranets that address their employees' personal life, providing information such as volunteer news, birth announcements, family-photo sharing and internal classified advertising. Video and TV: More and more television-type offerings are being added to intranets, underscoring the idea that video is more personal than the written word. Some sites even have their own TV station. "Intranet Design Annual 2007: The Year's Ten Best Intranets," which presents detailed case studies of the 10 winners, is available to download for $174 from the Nielsen Norman Group website at http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/design. About Nielsen Norman Group Nielsen Norman Group (http://www.nngroup.com) is a user-experience research firm that advises companies on how to succeed through the human-centered design of products and services. Nielsen Norman Group principals Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman and Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini are each world-renowned experts in usability and human use of technology. Besides authoring books and evangelizing about user experience, they and the other user-experience specialists at Nielsen Norman Group offer high-level strategic consultation on usability of websites, consumer products, software designs and anything else that needs to be easy-to-use. Media contact: Darcy Provo, Antenna Group, darcy@antennagroup.com, 415-977-1920. |
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