Nielsen Norman Group Awards the 10 Best-Designed Intranets.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 23, 2003

In its third annual contest to identify and spotlight the year's 10 best intranet designs, Nielsen Norman Group reviewed close to 100 intranets to find the best of the best. The winning intranets all illustrate and prove a significant 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%. The stories behind these successful intranets, along with expert analysis and commentary from Nielsen Norman Group's Jakob Nielsen, Kara Pernice Coyne and Candice Goodwin fill 175 pages in a report entitled "Intranet Design Annual 2003: The 10 Best Intranets of the Year."

"This is definitely the 'year of the user' for intranet design. It used to be that intranets were organized 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, principal of Nielsen Norman Group. "This year, our winning intranets all took a clear, user-centered approach to design."

Most of the winning intranets were from large organizations with tens of thousands of employees; three were from small consulting companies. The winners of Nielsen Norman Group's Intranet Design Annual 2003 are (in alphabetical order): Amadeus Global Travel Distribution, Spain; ChevronTexaco; Design Matters, Inc., a Web design agency; FIGG Engineering Group, a consultancy specializing in bridges; Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Germany; Landor Associates, a brand strategy consultancy; Mayo Clinic, a non-profit medical center; North Tyneside College, U.K.; United States Coast Guard; Wachovia Corporation, the 5th largest bank in the United States.

"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 at Nielsen Norman Group.

Common themes across several of the top 10 intranets included the following:

-- Email reduction: Several intranets had an explicit goal of

reducing the amount of email, and actually 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 find it when they need it;

-- Self-service content management: The winning intranets

recognized 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 is.

"Intranet Design Annual 2003: The 10 Best Intranets of the Year" is available to download for $98 from the Nielsen Norman Group website at http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/2003.

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, [e-mail], 415-977-1920.