Top 10 Intranets of 2006

We are in the process of redesigning the Intranet here at the Supreme Court.

Jakob Nielsen, one of the world's most well-known usability experts, has just published a summary of a major study on the characteristics of the world's best Intranets.

Among the trends described by Nielsen:

• Enforcing a consistent look and feel through active programs to train content creators in the use of templates and design standards
• Using task-based information architectures to bust up departmental silos
• Creating good global and local navigation, typically with general navigation in the left column, and the use of breadcrumbs
• Implementing trends from the web to the Intranet realm such as the use of internal blogs
• Expanding the scope of training areas
• Spending more time on user research and usability studies

According to the study, the top 10 Intranet sites belong to Allianz Australia Insurance (Australia), ALTANA Pharma (Germany), Bank of Ireland Group, Capital One (USA), IBM, Merrill Lynch, METRO Group (Germany), O2 (UK), Staples (USA), and Vodafone (UK).