Articles tagged: design

MARCH 2013

Designing intranet homepages that help employees do their jobs

How much of your intranet home is red (irrelevant) vs green (directly helpful for staff)?

FEBRUARY 2013

Five layers of enterprise mobile design

Designing for mobility goes beyond just small screens and touch interactions, to encompass the user’s context and tasks.

NOVEMBER 2012

Three ways to deliver mobile solutions

There are three approaches to delivering mobile functionality for staff: native apps, mobile web or hybrid apps.

CMb 2012-05

How to make this your last big intranet redesign

Intranet redesigns involve a huge amount of work, so how do we make this the last big redesign that’s needed?

CMB 2012-02

Briefing a visual design agency for intranet designs

Visual design is important for intranets, and great work by design agencies is key to this.

March 2012

Six keys to the digital workplace

The digital workplace offers a compelling vision of the future, but the right foundations must be in place.

CMb 2011–12

What message does your intranet send to your staff?

Organisations with a strong public brand and reputation are under growing pressure to deliver an intranet to match.

CMb 2011–11

Build upkeep into intranet redesign

Intranet redesigns truly succeed when they address longer-term strategy, management and governance issues.

CMb 2011–06

Ticker tape on the home page

Including a tickertape on the intranet homepage can be an effective way of communicating real-time updates.

APRIL 2011

Planning your SharePoint intranet project

While broadly like any other intranet project, SharePoint intranets bring unique opportunities and challenges.

CMb 2010-12

How long are intranet projects?

Intranet teams, and business stakeholders, often underestimate the length of intranet projects.

JULY 2010

What attractive intranets look like

Intranets can’t afford to be useful but ugly, and inspiration should be drawn from modern web design standards.

February 2010

Eight intranet design mistakes

Intranet projects are challenging, and it’s easy for teams to fall into common traps that can undo the good work being done.

OCTOBER 2009

Seven roles of the intranet homepage

There are many different uses for the intranet homepage, and a balance must be gained to meet business and staff needs.

CMb 2009–16

What to look for in a visual designer

Getting the right visual designer for your intranet or website project is critical.

CMb 2008-09

Should the intranet look sexy?

Public-facing websites often have a strong marketing element to them, but do intranets need to be as polished in their design?

MAY 2008

Intranet (re)design wrap-up

Over the years, we have published a vast amount of information on intranets. In this article, we attempt to wrap up all the activities that form part of an intranet design (or redesign) into one concise checklist.

CMb 2007-02

Search doesn’t work out-of-the-box

Out-of-the-box, search doesn’t work, and there is a small (but vital) piece of work needed to design and tune the search solution.

CMb 2006-18

Separate design and the CMS

Organisations are almost always better served by separating out the design and the CMS, and sourcing these from different providers.

OCTOBER 2006

The intranet homepage, protect it with a policy

An intranet homepage policy is tool that can provide some welcome support to intranet managers as well as providing a clear direction to business units and senior managers on the use of the homepage.

CMb 2006-14

Design intranets all the way to the bottom

It is not enough to focus an intranet redesign on just the home page, global navigation and page layout.

Introduction to web accessibility

The industry is finally accepting responsibility for providing accessible websites and intranets. Yet, a great deal of misunderstanding continues to surround the subject of accessibility.

DECEMBER 2005

The “all together” rule for intranets

Intranet content and tools should be aggregated, to help staff find required information, and to complete key tasks.

AUGUST 2005

Information scent: helping people find the content they want

Creating strong information scents allows users to confidently find desired content on websites and intranets.

CMb 2005-11

What to include in intranet search results

Much can be done to simplify search results pages, to make them easier to use for all staff to use.

CMb 2004-17

Is your intranet “Under Construction”?

Explores the advantages and disadvantages of using ‘under construction’ on an intranet.

CMb 2004-18

Using a “strawman” for page layout design

Using a ‘strawman’ design in the early stages of a project can help to overcome many of the difficulties in the design process.

MAY 2004

Designing and Managing an Intranet

AGIMO Better Practice Checklist, for staff responsible for intranets, including those in website or intranet teams.

AUGUST 2001

Deploying an effective search engine

A case study describing how to deliver a successful searching solution. Provides guidelines on user interface design, indexing configuration, search engine weightings and more.