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?

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.