Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC)

And the winner of the most useful intranet design competition 2011 is...

In a closely fought battle, Glenn Zanatta (pictured left) with 33 votes was the winner of the inaugural Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) intranet home page design competition.

Second place with 25 votes went to Jonathon Crabtree and third place with 24 votes was William Thomas. 185 people in total voted in the competition to decide the most useful intranet home page.  

Glenn's design is a radical departure from the typical news centric intranet home page. Features of his design include:

• A clear focus on activities and usefulness
• A simple and uncluttered interface
• An obvious compatibility with mobile and tablet interfaces in addition to the standard desktop/laptop
• A lack of pictures, unnecessary graphics and branding of any kind
• The lack of a top level horizontal menu

It is interesting that voters recognised and appreciated these qualities. Could this be a glimpse of the future of intranet home page design?

Congratulations to everyone who participated in the competition. It was clear that a number of participants invested a lot of time and effort in developing their pages. Many thanks to all those involved.  View all competition entries.

Below is Glenn's award winning design.

Glenn's description of his intranet design is below:

"An intranet homepage should provide a useful portal to the wealth of information and business data contained across the software and servers of any organisation.

My solution uses a set of task-oriented focusboards to provide a snapshot of this disparate information in a unified and consistent way. Visible information is relevant only to specific task types, minimising overload and helping the user avoid distraction.

The screens are designed to provide a consistent experience across desktop and mobile platforms, with the focusboards becoming a launchpad for more specific user processes like finding documents, working with email, or manipulating data.  Switching focusboards is as simple as a mouse click or a finger swipe.

With this approach, the intranet homepage becomes a functional environment immersing the user in everything needed to complete their job on a daily basis."

Glenn is available for hire: enquiries@zanatta.com.au
LinkedIn: http://au.linkedin.com/in/glennzanatta
© zanatta.com.au
Not to be reproduced without permission.

What do you think of Glenn's design? Is it the way of the future? Does any organisation have a similar design they would like to share?

Intranet home page design competition entries

All entries for the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) Intranet Home Page Design Competition have now been submitted. This was a competition open to anyone to design a USEFUL intranet home page. The winner of the competition, decided by the most votes, will receive an Amazon Kindle Fire.

To view the entries, you can either:

• scroll down and view the screen shots (click the screen shot to view a larger version), or
• click each link below to view a large screen shot. 

Once you have viewed each entry, you can:
Vote for which intranet home page you think would be the most USEFUL to its employees. 

Voting is open until January 2, 2012.

View current vote count

The entries are below:

1. COBI (City of Busselton Intranet) - Jonathon Crabtree
2. MyCo Intranet - Mike Gallers
3. The Customizers - Sonja Madsen
4. Unbranded 1 - Glenn Zanatta
5. Smart & Savvy - Tara Clark
6. CSL - Jan Haig
7. Alberta Blue Cross - Michael Lalli
8. Everything Everywhere - Simon Chesterman
9. Smart & Savvy Solutions 2 - Gabriele Sani
10. Unbranded 2 - William Thomas
11. Jimmy - Jonathon Crabtree

 

Descriptions of each entry are below:

1. COBI (City of Busselton Intranet) - Jonathon Crabtree

This design provides aggregated news and calendars from all departments for organisational newsfeed, and allows personalisation and quick searching for tools, docs and people.

User engagement promoted through submitting departmental and informal news and providing status updates that translate to user profile page.

Links in top left accordion menu are personalised and can be customised by clicking on the menu item title. The tag field is calculated from several metrics – hits, time on page, user ratings. 

The tab menu at the top provides quick access to company info, resources, forums and wikis and user profile page for staff directory.

Vote for the most useful intranet here

 

2. MyCo Intranet - Mike Gallers

The homepage is the aggregation for important content from across the whole portal. The 2nd level landing pages aggregate content from that domain. With this homepage, it obviously has portal navigation and search by content type. 

Also the first task it accomplishes is recent news in an engaging format. Then there is also an 'activity tracker' which lets you know what is going on in the sites you are member of.

The right rail is a little more fun, with recent searches (company buzz), ratings of local eateries, weather for your location and/or locations you visit frequently for work, and then recent blog posts.

Vote for the most useful intranet here

 

3. The Customizers - Sonja Madsen

• Metro style with large buttons used to make intranet easy to use on mobile devices (Ipads, phones etc.)
• Breaking News - displays the most important news
• Corporate news - displays 4 latest news with "More news" link to a News site
• My Department Site - displays latest department news
• Company Calendar: displays corporate activities to come
• Orange buttons on the right are links to corporate intranet content: such as Tools (Register time, work related content, employee discussions, buy&sell...), Templates (sales contracts), Meeting Rooms and Links
• Grey buttons on the right are links to Carl Alexander's personal content such as a profile page, subscriptions, recent documents, Carl's project sites and Carl’s personal links

Vote for the most useful intranet here

 

4. Unbranded 1 - Glenn Zanatta

An intranet homepage should provide a useful portal to the wealth of information and business data contained across the software and servers of any organisation.

My solution uses a set of task-oriented focusboards to provide a snapshot of this disparate information in a unified and consistent way. Visible information is relevant only to specific task types, minimising overload and helping the user avoid distraction.

The screens are designed to provide a consistent experience across desktop and mobile platforms, with the focusboards becoming a launchpad for more specific user processes like finding documents, working with email, or manipulating data.  Switching focusboards is as simple as a mouse click or a finger swipe.

With this approach, the intranet homepage becomes a functional environment immersing the user in everything needed to complete their job on a daily basis.

Available for hire: enquiries@zanatta.com.au
LinkedIn: http://au.linkedin.com/in/glennzanatta
© zanatta.com.au
Not to be reproduced without permission.

Vote for the most useful intranet here

 

5. Smart & Savvy - Tara Clark

The Smart & Savvy intranet brings together offices from around the globe on a sleek, social intranet. The Smart Connections area is a “wall” that employees can post questions, comments and share their wins at the company.

Project videos are presentations, educational webinars and videos that offices around the globe share with one another. The city and time zones are included as a useful tool for the international offices. Global Meetups is a way for employees to connect in their cities. My Team links include all of the useful information that an employee would need.

The quick poll gets employees involved by asking their feedback about the site. Smart News gives offices the opportunity to highlight their business success. Work Smart houses collaboration tools like forums, suggestions, discussions and much more!

Vote for the most useful intranet here

 

6. CSL - Jan Haig

We have designed our homepage to include:

• Major announcements of global company-wide interest, upper left
• A series of icons, upper middle, quick-linking to areas designated by employees as most used/requested 
• Stock price, local time/weather, upper right; our business travelers can also click to weather at other company locations 
• Three information/content buckets, across the middle row, customizable to each specific location’s news, etc. (the sample displays King of Prussia, one of our main locations in Pennsylvania, USA).
• Links across the bottom row to content at our other geographical sites, for employees who want to check out what’s happening at other locations
• Header links to feeds, comments, translations, and “how to’s” 

Vote for the most useful intranet here

 

7. Alberta Blue Cross - Michael Lalli

Employees can use Intrablue for their latest news, events, documentation, training and much more! All the major information about events can be found on Intrablue. A photo gallery enables employees to view and comment on pictures from past corporate events.

Each department has their own section and intranet editors can update their own content to increase the efficiency of their department. We used a horizontal menu as our global navigation. Each department has their own vertical flex menu because it is useful for organizing a vast majority of content. We want our Intranet to be professional, simple, and easy to use.

Vote for the most useful intranet here

 

8. Everything Everywhere - Simon Chesterman

The homepage is all about company news and features a consistent top navigation bar with a sub menu to make navigating the site quick, logical and easy. The main news feature auto rotates through 5 of the latest articles and users can manually jump between these using the left and right arrows.  Below on the left is the main news roll-up with pagination navigation at the bottom.  The icons in the news roll-up show when it was published, the publishers name and how many comments have been made. The right hand column has the most popular and common user task in one place, a directory look-up, a customizable links section, location information and food menus and jobs search links. The site footer provides links for popular tasks and partner sites.

Vote for the most useful intranet here

 

9. Smart & Savvy Solutions 2 - Gabriele Sani

A digital workspace needs to give to each user all the tools s/he needs to work - form the office or remotely. This submission is an attempt to reach this goal, proposing a customizable homepage that is a mix between a dashboard and a user profile to highlight the connection between the user and his/her own tools, while drawing attention to the content that the users should be aware of.

Vote for the most useful intranet here

 

10. Unbranded 2 - William Thomas

Navigation to the site through a mega menu which enables access to content three levels deep.  Labelling provides clear distinctive scent to users.  This navigation allows the homepage space to be dedicated to helping the user achieve their primary tasks.  Personalisation exists across the page. The main area can be customised to drop in work panels that can be brought into focus.  Access to user’s tools, forms, feeds and information on their work day.  Communication and collaboration is catered for with integrated messaging and instant access to shared documents. CEO Blogs, and News is secondary but easily accessible. 

Vote for the most useful intranet here

 

11. Jimmy - Jonathon Crabtree

Features:

• Top navigation is mega-menu drop-down for sub-navigation matching site structure
• Featured articles appear in slideshow
• Daily calendar of events, select month to view events in that month
• Corporate news (latest 3 articles)
• Upcoming events (next 3 events)
• Informal/social posts (latest 3 articles)
• User customised panels on right, can select favourite contacts, documents, links. All content on intranet has “add to favourites”
• Search staff or documents from top navigation, or whole intranet
• Status message appears in phonebook
• Banner ad space at top
• Link to page author at footer to notify of errors or omissions

 Vote for the most useful intranet here

 

Voting

If you haven't already, don't forget to vote for which intranet home page you think would be the most USEFUL to its employees.

The winning entry will receive a Kindle Fire and will also be intereviewed by the Worldwide Intranet Challenge.

Reminder: Just a few days left to enter the intranet home page competition

I am reading a book called ReWork at the moment. It is written by the guys who began and run 37signals. They are a small company that makes software - such as Basecamp and Backback - to help other small companies. More than 3 million people around the world use their products and they make millions of dollars in profit each year with a staff of less than 20.

 

"Scratch your own itch"

There is a section in the book called 'Scratch your own itch' which says 'The easiest way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use'. The section goes on to say that 'If you're solving someone else's problem, you're constantly stabbing the dark. When you solve your own problem, the light comes on. You know exactly what the right answer is'.

There are many examples of how great products or services have been developed by people solving their own problems:

• Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith wanted a better way to communicate while they working on a project. To solve their problem, they developed a web based email system called Hotmail. In 1997, Microsoft acquired Hotmail for $400 million dollars.
• 
  
  At the end of 1994, a couple of guys called Jerry Yang and David Filo developed an index for themselves to track the technical papers they would have to reference for their PhD theses. Word got around about this index and their class mates began sending them emails saying 'Can you add this?'. The site grew rapidly and was eventually called Yahoo. These days Yahoo has a market capitalization of around 19 billion dollars. 
• 37signals themselves build products they need to run their own business. They also sell these products. 

 

The intranet home page design competition

So why not 'scratch your own itch', design an intranet home page that YOU would find useful and enter the Intranet Homepage Design competition. There are just a few days left to submit your entry. 

And for all those intranet professionals, now is your chance to demonstrate your passion, 'stop talking and start walking', 'put your money where you mouth is' and design what YOU think is the perfect intranet home page.

You could win a newly released Amazon Kindle Fire. Plus you might find your intranet street cred goes through the roof!

Competition: Design a useful intranet home page and win a Kindle

Have you ever looked at your organization's intranet home page, and thought 'I can do better than this'? Would you like to be recognized world-wide as an intranet design genius? Would you like to get your hands on a Kindle Fire (valued at $199)? 

Well now is your big chance! The Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) thinks intranet home pages are due for a radical overhaul and is sponsoring a competition, open to anyone, to design a USEFUL intranet home page.

You can design the home page for your own organization if you wish. Or you can design the page for a fictitious organization (for example, Smart & Savvy Solutions - see below for more details about S&SS). 

 

Designing the home page

You can design your home page using any tool you like - Visio, Powerpoint, Paint.net, Photoshop, webs.com... or you could use a more purpose built tool such as Balsamiq, IntranetWireFrames, and Intranetfactory (all of these products offer a free trial). You could even hand draw it on paper and then scan it...  it's up to you to decide which tool suits you best. The only requirement is that final entries are submitted as an image file (eg. .PNG .JPG .GIF).

Your design can be as detailed, good looking, boring or as interesting as you like. You might take 30 minutes to whip up a design or it could take you a few hours. It's up to you how much time and effort you put in.The criteria that people will be asked to use for voting is simply:

Which intranet home page do you think would be the most useful to its employees?

 

Competition Details

The competition is open now. Entries can be submitted by email to:

• awright@cibasolutions.com.au
• Subject: Intranet Home Page Design competition 
• Using 100 words or less, explain your design, its features and how it works

To get you going, you may find the following resources useful:

• 9 intranet content types that add value to your organisation
• The most useful intranet types
• Should there be news on the frontpage of the intranet
• Discussing the length of the intranet homepage
• Seven roles of the intranet homepage
• 37 intranet home page screen shots

Important note: This is NOT a competition for people to submit screen shots of existing intranets. Jakob Nielson's top 10 intranet award and the IBF's My Beautiful Intranet competition are two opportunities for doing this.  

 

Smart & Savvy Solutions - company background

S&SS has around 800 employees worldwide and provides consulting services to other organizations, helping them streamline, organize and improve internal business processes. Around 600 employees work away from the office on client sites or from home. The company has small office teams of 10-20 people in a dozen of the world's major cities.

The company's main documents include project plans, proposals, design and solution documents, case studies, contracts, research papers and the other usual documents you would expect to find in a consulting organization. Most revenue comes from project based work.

 

Summary of conditions

• Anyone can enter the competition. You can submit more than one entry if you wish.
• You can use any tool or software you like to design your page. Entries need to be submitted as an image file (eg .PNG .JPG .GIF)
• The winner will be decided by a public vote and will receive a Kindle Fire (due for release November 15)
• The winner will also be interviewed and a blog article written explaining the inspiration behind the winning design. The article will be emailed in an announcement to the 11,000+ WIC LinkedIn Group members.
• The criteria people will use for voting will be:"'Which intranet home page do you think would be the most useful to its employees?"
• Entries close on Monday December 5, 2011
• An intranet panel will review all intranet entries and select a final list of 20 to be published and eligible to receive votes
• The WIC reserves the right to remove an entry deemed to have obtained votes unfairly
• All finalists names will be published 
• All entries will be published at the same time on December 7 and voting will be open for 3 weeks.
• The winner will be announced on December 31st, 2012.