The 1024×768 became the leading monitor size in 2004 and has only just been dethroned by a (slightly) larger screen resolution of 1366×768, according to StatCounter.

The change over from 1024×768 to bigger screens actually occurred in 2009, but there were so many different larger-resolution sizes — including many widescreen monitors — that 1024×768 held its position as the single-most popular resolution until this year.

The following chart shows the evolution in computer screen sizes from 1999 to 2012 averaged across as many sources as I could find for each year. (Averaging reduces the influence of bad data in any one statistic.) This is for desktop and laptop computers; not mobile devices.

Implications of Bigger Monitors

• Changes in screen sizes happen very slowly. Once people own a monitor, they don't upgrade it for years, even if they do get a new PC. This is particularly true in corporate settings, despite the productivity benefits from giving all high-paid staff members a 30-inch monitor (or bigger, if available).
• Small screens are finally so rare for desktop computers that we don't have to design for them. But now even smaller mobile screens have become popular enough that we have to consider small screens anyway :-(
• Big screens are now the most common class of desktop monitor (1280–1600 pixels wide). I call these screens "big" only in comparison with those that went before; in reality, even the size labeled "huge" in the chart is still too small for maximum knowledge worker productivity.
• In usability studies, the cardinal rule is always to test on the equipment used by the most customers. So, you should now run most of your studies with "big" monitors. You should also run a few sessions on "medium" and "huge" monitors to make sure that your design remains usable for people with different screen sizes. (For more info, see our full-day training class on User Testing.)
• For web design, I've always recommended avoiding "frozen" designs and instead ensuring that your design can scale across a range of screen resolutions (especially since the really important number is the browser canvas resolution, which is often smaller than full screen, particularly on huge monitors).
• Still, you must target something as the best case, where the design looks its finest (while still working on bigger and smaller screens). Since 2010, the core design target has been the big screen. For a few years, it will be safest to target screens in the lower range of the "big" category.

Both old and new guidelines come with an important caveat: make sure that the design works almost as well at several sizes up and down from the core target. Thus, the term "optimize for" should definitely not be interpreted as "only working at."

Supporting Big Widescreen Monitors

• The share of various smaller monitor sizes in the installed base will gradually decline. This will happen slowly, but it will happen.
• The screens labeled "big" on my chart will soon start dropping off.
• The screens I call "huge" will start taking over.
• Even bigger sizes will emerge ("super huge"?)

Screens that are very wide but not particularly tall are well matched with the human visual system. However, they don't fit the way we currently design web pages: most web layouts are fairly narrow and very long.

Designers should start experimenting with ways to utilize horizontal screen space and create web pages that enhance usability for people with big monitors and widescreen monitors. (They should also use methods such as responsive design to continue supporting those smaller screens, which will be with us until decade's end.) 

Learn More

And more on human vision and perception in the training course on The Human Mind.

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Should you identify the author of articles and other website content? Or should the material remain anonymous and be published under the organization's institutional voice?

Unfortunately, there's no single answer to the Web bylines question. But there are a number of criteria.

Against Bylines: Cut the Fluff

• As always when writing for the web, one main guideline is to keep it short. Users spend very little time on web pages; information that doesn't provide sufficient value-add should be left out. On average, users read only about 120 words per page view, so you may not want 3 of those few words to be "by Joe Schmoe."
• Mobile copy should be cut even more. Even if some of the following criteria lead you to include bylines, it might be better to remove them for the mobile version of your site.

For Bylines: Establish Credibility

• If the author is famous — maybe even famous enough that people might read the piece mainly to hear what he or she has to say on some current issue. In this case, you should include the author's name when linking to the article from home pages, SERPs (search engine results pages), article listings, Tweets, etc.
  • Note that "fame" doesn't necessarily equate to "celebrity." Respected geeks can be well known in specialized communities, while being completely unknown to 99% of the population. What counts is whether the author is known to the target audience.
• If the author has credentials or status that support the article's credibility. The classic example is a medical doctor writing about a health issue, in which case you should certainly list the article as being "by Joe Schmoe, MD."
• If the author has experience that provides some credibility. For example, the designer of a website should be named when writing an article discussing that design.
• If somebody often writes about a certain topic, regular readers might recognize the name and want to seek out the writer's other articles.
• Opinion pieces, reviews, political commentary, and other types of content that are specifically positioned as an individual person's take on an issue need a byline simply to clarify the content's status. Depending on the nature of the site, such content might also require a disclaimer that the analysis does not necessarily represent the organization's position.
• Finally, on intranets, naming authors can help establish a feeling of community by helping employees get to know each other (for more on this, see our separate report on intranet social media).

Author Bios

Longer biographies should be relegated to secondary pages and linked from the author's name. But don't link the name to an email address, for two reasons:

• It's distracting for users when clicking a name initiates an email instead of showing a new webpage, which is the expected behavior of web links. (This was #4 on my list of top-10 design mistakes of 1999, but I still see this erroneous design 13 years later.)
• Users are much more likely to want read about the author than to contact the author. If appropriate, you can add contact info at the bottom of the biography page.

Finally, the author bio page should include links to the author's other articles on the site, except in the case of weblogs or other sites that are essentially the work of a single author.

Learn More

• Writing for the Web 1: Foundations of Web Content
• Writing for the Web 2: Presenting Compelling Content
• Credibility and Persuasive Web Design
• Content Strategy (2 days, select cities only)
• Writing for Mobile Users: Content Usability for Mobile Websites, Apps & Email

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The 10 best-designed intranets for 2012 are:

• CenturyLink Business, a telecommunications company (US)
• Everything Everywhere, a communications company (UK)
• Genentech, a biotechnology company (US)
• LivePerson, Inc., a communications company (US)
• Logica, a business and technology service company (UK)
• MAN Diesel & Turbo SE, provider of large-bore diesel engines and turbomachinery for marine and stationary applications (Germany)
• NCR Corporation, a technology company (US)
• The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company, a marketer of branded consumer products for lawn and garden care (US)
• Skanska, a project development and construction group (Sweden)
• Staples, Inc., an office products company (US)

In this, our 12^th Intranet Design Annual, Staples — which also won in 2006 — joins an elite group of 7 two-time winners (out of 120 total). Among those twice-honored companies are Cisco Systems (2001, 2005), Credit Suisse (2002, 2011), Verizon Communications (2005, 2011) and Walmart (2002, 2010). In addition, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu's Australian member firm's intranet won in 2002, followed by its worldwide intranet in 2009. Finally, in 2001, silverorange won our first competition and received an honorable mention in 2003.

Kudos to Staples and the other multi-year winners for their design prowess and their organizations' continued intranet commitment. It's significant that these organizations recognize that intranet design is never "set and forget." Instead of perpetually sustaining their first winning designs, these companies continued to progress because they understood 3 important factors:

• Their organizations are continually experiencing change.
• Monitoring content and sections as they are added or need to be added on the intranet keeps you abreast of potential problems. As page templates and information architecture are taxed, design must transform to accommodate, first with tweaks and then with greater modifications.
• A company's intranet is perceived in the context of evolving external websites and other applications that employees use. When employees switch between using the web and their company intranets, they shouldn't feel like they've gone from driving a 2012 ZL1 Camaro to a 1989 Chevy Nova with faulty brakes — that is, the intranet experience shouldn't feel slow, dangerous (due to inaccurate information), and tedious.

• Technology (3 winners)
• Utility (2 winners)
• Biotechnology (1 winner)
• Consumer packaged goods (1 winner)
• Engineering (1 winner)
• Manufacturing (1 winner)
• Retail (1 winner)

Both the utility and engineering industries are establishing a design stronghold; this is the third straight year they've been represented among our winners. Making the list for the first time this year are a biotechnology company and a consumer packaged-goods company.

Given the world financial crisis, it's no surprise that there are no winners from the financial industry this year, even after very strong showings in most previous years. Given their track record, we suspect that had more financial companies had the time and resources to spend on their intranets, the industry would have produced a winner.

Although the economies in the US and Europe are suffering, their intranet designs are not. This year, winning companies come from 4 different countries: 6 from the US, 2 from the UK, and 1 each from Germany and Sweden. None of these countries are strangers to our top-10 list. Since our first Design Annual, the US has won 63 times; the UK, 10; Germany, 7; and Sweden, 6. Although all of these scores are impressive, Sweden's record is amazing given the country's size.

Smaller Companies Still Have Better Intranets

The average number of employees in this year's winning organizations is 19,700, which is the smallest we've seen in the 12 years since our contest launched (excluding 2004's government-only focused Annual). In the past 3 years, the averages were: 37,900 in 2011, 39,100 in 2010 (excluding the mammoth Walmart, with its 1.4 million store associates); and 37,500 in 2009. These were essentially the same numbers 3 years in a row, which makes it striking that this year's winners are so much smaller. Across all 12 Design Annuals, the overall average company size is 60,000 employees — which again emphasizes the smaller size of this new crop of winners.

Technology offerings might contribute to the success of our current, smaller winners: as a very long-term trend, it's getting easier to implement designs with good usability, bringing quality user experience within the reach of ever-smaller companies.

The goals, constraints, resources, and legacy systems at these small organizations varied widely, and thus their technology choices also differed. For example, LivePerson uses Jive Software, an SAS platform vendor, in 3 ways: to host the intranet, as its social business software solution, and as a content management system (CMS). In-house developers customized the systems to meet their needs. Because of the simple design, training, and a culture that encourages content contributions, an average of 52 percent of the company's employees contribute to the intranet each month.

At CenturyLink Business, the application core is a custom CMS developed in Ruby using the open source Ruby on Rails web application framework. The intranet developers — who are both in-house and from an external agency — relish the flexibility, but could do without having to depend on upgrades and patches from an open source provider (in this case, Peak Systems). This is especially true when weighing the upgrade regularity of out-of-the box vendors.

Scotts Miracle-Gro internal developers built "The Garden" on the SAP NetWeaver Portal using SAP's Web Page Composer tool, with heavy modification of both courtesy of the Scotts technical team.

Finally, one of Genentech's goals for the intranet redesign was to replace technology from the 2008 solution with technology that better matched its business goals. Unexpected dependencies (for example, upgrading component A means you must also upgrade B and C) made the process more difficult than team members banked on, but they ultimately chose Moveable Type as their CMS solution. They removed an enterprise portal (Vignette/OpenText), as well as some SSO components and several additional technologies. To meet their needs, they chose design tools such as Adobe Suite and some Apple-specific software.

Team Size Is Up: Teams Do More with More

Team size as a percentage of company size is more than double what it was in 2011, reaching an all-time high of 0.074%. More strikingly, intranet team sizes (as a proportion of organization sizes) are now 6 times what they were in 2001.

Note, however, that 8 of the 10 winning teams this year worked together with outside agencies or consultants on their redesign projects, so this part of the team is not likely to be a sustainable resource. Still, a combination of both internal and external developers and designers is an unbeatable recipe for redesign projects, as internal teams have better knowledge about the organization, its employees, and its business needs, while external teams often have more and varied experience with resources, technology, and current design trends and skills. In earlier years of the Design Annual, we often saw external firms designing the intranets almost exclusively, but this trend is now just a memory. Today, it's far more common for internal teams to couple with external agencies. In fact, the number of winners that combine internal and external team members has steadily increased in recent years: 3 in 2008; 6 in 2009; 7 in 2010; and 8 in both 2011 and 2012.

Mobile Intranets: Stunted Growth

There are 3 probable reasons for the lack of traction in the mobile intranet space:

• Intranet groups still don't have the budget and resources needed to develop anything beyond the main intranet site.
• Unless the organization has one company-issued mobile device, it's difficult for intranet teams to choose which device to focus on — so, instead they design for none.
• Creating a mobile intranet version that would work on any device is one possible solution. However, as per our mobile guidelines, even a single mobile version would have to be a separate design from that of the website to be truly helpful and usable for employees. And it takes resources to create and maintain two separate applications.

Evolving UI Elements

• Innovative menus. Menus are the gateway to content. Like our winning teams, your team should thoroughly test nonstandard menu UIs and iterate the design before deploying the menus at your organization. Scotts Miracle-Gro, Logica, and NCR all adopted and adapted the mega menu with category sections, and even added a menu within the mega menu. LivePerson's mini-dashboard of icons in the upper left of pages is an imaginative way to enable quick access to highly important content.
• Lightboxes. Lightboxes (which descended from old-school modal dialogs) have raided today's intranet designs, appearing in most of our winning intranets. However, our winning designers selectively employ lightboxes only when they want an extremely strong focus on questions in the open dialog box and therefore wish the other potentially distracting content to fall away. (If having other content visible and clickable is important, don't use lightboxes. Even if the particular lightbox is technically modeless, users usually won't think to click off them because of the aesthetic UI.) A few years back, we named lightboxes the interaction design technique of the year; clearly, it's taken a bit of time for this idea to become pervasive.

Supporting Design and the Organization

• Decentralized to centralized. Portal programs today make it easy for individuals to create communities and team spaces. Theoretically, offering an instrument to enable information sharing is beneficial; the negative byproduct, however, is that doing so encourages silos. Organizations with compartmentalized content run the risk of having duplicate, outdated, or incorrect information that's not included in the intranet-wide search or in the main IA. In other words, information is nearly impossible to find. Content in silos was a prevalent problem in the early 2000s; until recently, the issue was fading from view. Today's winning designers are getting back to tackling old school (or at least new old school) problems: Logica, NCR, and Skanska all did tremendous work in moving from decentralized intranet sites to a centralized intranet with an IA and structure that accommodate everyone. Similarly, MAN Diesel & Turbo combined two companies with their design.
• Lorem ipsum dolor must die. This year's winners were very strongly focused on content quality early on and throughout the design process. They understood that training content managers later in the process is costly and results in more time spent on fixing problems than on writing. Organizations can avoid content-related issues by prepping people upfront with training sessions, guidelines, and recommendations like our winners did. Everything Everywhere suggested its writers adopt a "newsroom mentality" and write articles of 250 words or less. Likewise, Genentech guidelines emphasized brief, clear, easy-to-follow content. Logica created a "Campaign Against Corporate Blah" to make departmental pages more meaningful, while Scotts Miracle-Gro writers focused on sharing what they know about their consumers. Also, you may as well forget about blank rectangles and lorem ipsum text filling design wireframes. Take a cue from MAN Diesel & Turbo and pour your organization's actual content into the wireframes so you can get, early on, a true sense of how they'll actually work with your content and how to massage the layouts.
• Foiling personalization. Targeting content to people — based on their location, job role, team, and other factors — is fairly common on intranets today and has been for a few years now. These features keep clutter at bay and give employees the apps and content they need. But what if a person spans two locations or manages people in diverse roles and needs to see their content? Short of creating a "Super User" role, this problem can be a bit thorny. A trend we are seeing that skirts these issues is to let users select a different role to browse content. For example, MAN Diesel & Turbo's View Content applet lets users choose an organization unit and location and temporarily display the associated content rather than their own location information. Similarly, at Skanska, information is targeted to the user but also offers flexibility in that all information is available via search or by switching the view of the site to Browse As another employee type.

Social!

• Lightning-fast access to coworker information. Remember the days when intranets made it painstaking to learn anything about coworkers? Sometimes just figuring out how to search for people was a task failure in itself. Today's great intranets make it quick and easy for users to access information about their colleagues. MAN Diesel & Turbo takes fly-out windows to a new level, quickly displaying information about people as you type your query in the people search box. In their company organization charts, both the Everything Everywhere and NCR intranets do something similar with pop-ups: when users mouse over a name, the person's team, a photo, and other information appears. On Genentech's homepage, the Who Is section profiles interesting individuals at the company, and shares personal as well as professional information. Skanska offers a Knowledge Map to help users find experts in the company and ask them questions.
• Integrating employee profile pages with wall feeds. Although social networking exploded on intranets in the last few years, feeds were not abundant until this year. LivePerson's employee profile page functions like a social media profile on steroids. In its user profile pages, Staples features a personalized feed, The Board, while Logica's main page takes a newsfeed approach to presenting content pushed by country or service update and more.
• Supportive and accessible management. Today's business leaders have emerged from their executive suites and plunged into the information-sharing world, and they have adapted well. They are blogging, soliciting questions in public forums, and answering those questions. For example, Everything Everywhere offers VP Space, where VPs and teams communicate and connect via blogs, videos, status updates, pictures, and polls. The Genentech Executive Committee Bios focus on factoids — such as preferences between sushi or salad, coffee or tea. Both LivePerson and Logica's CEO blogs are among the more popular features on their respective intranets, and both CEOs support transparency at their organizations.
• Cheering personal content (in addition to business content). Employers recognize that employees also want to be identified as human beings, and they're celebrating this on their intranets. At Staples, people are encouraged to blog and write in feeds about both business and personal topics. LivePerson's intranet offers an array of social features that encourage employees to share. Similarly, Logica lets employees personalize their profiles with About Me content.

ROI

Genentech, LivePerson, Logica, Scotts Miracle-Gro, and Staples cited additional indications of user interest, including an increase in comments and ratings per story, photo contributions, blog posts, tagged items, and poll participation.

NCR collected metrics about the effects of content in silos. In the past, users would go to one intranet site for corporate news, another for human resources (HR) information, and possibly others if they needed to access marketing collateral or online applications. The new intranet helps users find information in more than one-third fewer intranet site visits, which decreased from 482,362 to 320,620.

With positive return on investment, evolving designs, more social engagement, stronger management support, and better intranet team size to company size ratio, our 2012 winning intranet designs provide a wonderful set of examples we can revere and learn from.

Full Report

Learn More

The conference also has a full-day course on Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability and a 2-day course on Information Architecture (IA), which mostly are just as applicable to intranets.

We cover the underlying research that explains why certain UIs work or don't work in the seminars on The Human Mind and Usability: How Your Customers Thinkand From Science to Design: Applying HCI Principles to Real World Problems.

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It's been 11 years since our original studies of e-commerce usability — long enough that it's definitely worth revisiting the topic. The bottom line? The number of usability guidelines for e-commerce sites has increased from 207 in the first edition of the report to 874 in the new edition. Using this rough metric, we now know 4.2 times as much about e-commerce user experience as we did during the dot-com bubble.

Usability: Marked Improvements

In other words, during the dot-com bubble, users attempting to shop on e-commerce sites failed almost half the time. No wonder the bubble burst, with sites that bad. Now, users fail slightly more than a quarter of the time. Sites are still leaving plenty of money on the table, but not as much.

Today, our main reason to recommend usability improvements for e-commerce sites is the competitive pressure from other sites that keep getting better. Today's consumers aren't satisfied with sites that simply make it possible to shop; the experience must also be pleasant. So, while you could argue for improving design purely to reduce user failures, it's now necessary to look beyond simple success rates — even though a user's ability to complete tasks is the obvious first requirement.

Search remains a sore point, even though it has improved somewhat. In our first study, users succeeded in their initial search attempt on an e-commerce site 51% of the time. In the new study, users' first within-site query was successful 64% of the time.

However, user expectations for search quality are far beyond what today's websites actually deliver. As with most aspects of web usability, user expectations are set by their aggregated user experience from around the web. (As Jakob's Law states: users spend the majority of their time on other sites than yours.) In the case of search, this means Google and the other major search engines — which, while not perfect, do work pretty well.

When users search an e-commerce site and don't find what they want, they often assume that the site doesn't have the desired product. Users have poor search skills and will typically leave a site rather than figure out how to reformulate their queries.

Old Study Findings Stand

The one guideline we retracted? Offer a special welcome page for new shoppers. Today, it's safe to assume that by the time users arrive at your site, they've probably already shopped elsewhere. E-commerce is no longer new, and users no longer need to be told what it is. As long as the site is easy to use, people will use it.

The fact that 99.5% of our 11-year-old guidelines were confirmed is an indication of the longevity of usability findings. Our design recommendations are based on the characteristics of the human mind, which change much more slowly than the technology that seems to fascinate so many people in the field.

New User Research

In total, users tested 206 sites — more than 10 times as many as were tested in our original research. As I noted above, we identified "only" 4.2 times as many usability guidelines, which indicates some degree of diminishing returns from enlarging user research studies.

The tested sites covered an incredibly wide range of industries and products, from high culture to low (Paris Museum Pass and NASCAR), from cheap to expensive (Walmart and Tiffany's), from virtual to physical (Ticketmaster and The Container Store), and from general interest to highly specialized (Zappos and Lightbulbs.com).

Except for the diary studies, all studies were conducted as direct empirical observation of users' actual behavior as they engaged in online shopping. We sat next to users, one-on-one, and asked them to think out loud as they performed specific tasks. This research approach provides deep insights into why users behave the way they do and results in findings that are not available from other methods.

Some test tasks were highly directed, assessing the degree to which the design supported users who arrived at a site with a predetermined goal. For example: "Buy an air conditioner to put in the window of a room that is 10 feet by 20 feet (200 square feet). Get one that is energy-efficient and that has a remote. Buy it from www.homedepot.com."

Other tasks were broader, assessing the degree to which the site could inspire users who didn't have a particular need in mind. For example: "You just got a promotion and a bonus, and you want to treat yourself. Buy yourself something. Spend no more than £200 at Links of London."

We also tested web-wide tasks that didn't specify which site the user should visit. For example, in one task, we gave users a burned-out light bulb and the following instructions: "The light bulb in your desk lamp just burned out. Get a replacement for it."

Finally, we tested a range of customer service tasks. For example: "Can you get a refund for tickets you buy from cinema.com.hk if there is a typhoon signal?"

Supporting Different Types of Shoppers

2/3 of the time, users visited a site with a pre-determined goal: 35% of visits were to look for a particular type of product (without having a specific product in mind), and 27% of visits were to look for a specific product.

1/3 of the time, users visited a site to see what the site had to offer. Such visits were often prompted by the receipt of an email newsletter or otherwise learning about sales or special offers.

Sites must support all four types of use:

• known-item purchases;
• category research, where users identify and buy products that best match their needs;
• bargain-hunting; and
• browsing for inspiration.

Bad Content Kill Sales

But in our new studies, the main problem was not so much finding the product as it was finding information about the product. Indeed, 55% of the 143 user failures we observed were caused by bad content — typically, incomplete or unclear information or uninformative error messages. Users sometimes indicated that they planned to call or email the site, a clear sign that the company had neglected the opportunity to answer their questions on the site itself.

Content can be verbal or visual. Either way, it must provide the information users need to both decide on products and feel comfortable trusting the site with their money.

The key downside of e-commerce is that users cannot touch, feel, see, taste, or smell the offerings. Nor do customers benefit from the essential credibility boost of having the purchase in hand before paying the price. That is, there's no tactile experience. Online shopping is purely an information experience. (Or user experience, as we like to say.) This again places a huge premium on good content. And many sites fail to deliver.

Finally, how many times do we have to repeat the guideline that when users ask for a bigger product photo, the site should show a dramatically bigger picture? Inadequate photo enlargement was #10 on the list of top-10 web-design mistakes of 2005. Although an old guideline, it's still frequently violated.

Loyalty = Business

In the web-wide tasks, we didn't specify which site users should visit to make purchases. Not surprisingly, half of the users went straight to a search engine. But it was a bit of a surprise that the other half of users went directly to some site they already knew.

Bypassing the search engines' tollbooth on the information highway is user loyalty's first benefit. But the advantages reach much further.

Of users who started by searching the web, only 39% completed their task on the first site they selected from the SERP (search engine results page). That is, almost 2/3 of search users abandoned their first love and proceeded to do business elsewhere. This outcome demonstrates that SEO and good search engine ranking are necessary but not sufficient for Internet business success. It's actually more important to satisfy users once they arrive at your site. Search users exhibit little loyalty to sites they happen to click on.

In contrast, users who bypassed search and went directly to a preferred site overwhelmingly gave their money to that site: 71% did so, while only 29% completed their task elsewhere. (Of course, the latter group is a significant amount of lost business; clearly, you can't take e-commerce users for granted, even when they're loyal to your site.)

The benefits of loyalty might make you push aggressive registration requirements, but that would be a mistake. You must convert first-time shoppers before they can become long-time shoppers, and users strongly resent up-front registration. On the other hand, users frequently complained about the drudgingly large amount of data entry required to complete a purchase. So, by reminding repeat users of the time savings, you can nudge them to register eventually.

In general, sites would benefit from a longer-term perspective on the full sales cycle and total user experience. A transmedia design strategy should reach beyond the main website to encompass a mobile site, an email newsletter strategy, and good customer service (including good confirmation messages). Yes, e-commerce user experience has come far, but it has even further to go to truly meet customer needs.

Learn More

Full-day training courses at the annual Usability Week conference:

• Credibility and Persuasive Web Design
• Writing for the Web 1: Foundations of Web Content
• Writing for the Web 2: Presenting Compelling Content
• Content Strategy (2 days, select cities only)
• Writing for Mobile Users: Content Usability for Mobile Websites, Apps, and Email
• Email Newsletter Usability

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The headline for our last intranet portal study was "Enterprise Portals Are Popping." Now, 3 years later, we revisited this space with new research and our findings would best be summarized as "Enterprise Portals Are Stabilizing." Although we saw some new features, the main push was to make existing features more robust and better managed.

For this latest research round, we looked at intranet portals in 19 organizations, spanning the globe from Australia's ANZ Bank to the British Red Cross and South African Breweries. In total, across all the research, our recommendations for portal design are now based on 67 case studies of intranet portals.

Early definitions of "portal" focused on the gateway concept, but times have changed: characterizing portals as mere doorways to other places no longer adequately describes the sophisticated role they play. Today's portals are not just about access; the best ones provide true integration of enterprise information, resources, and tools in a unified user experience. The portal is a dashboard that offers all the enterprise information and applications that employees need to do their jobs.

At the same time, the distinction between intranet and portal is diminishing as companies increasingly adopt a portal perspective for their intranets. The trend is toward "an intranet is an intranet is an intranet" and a portal is just a nicer, more functional intranet that integrates more systems.

The ROI from achieving the full portal vision is clear: saving countless, costly staff-hours that would otherwise be wasted hunting for information on various systems and learning incompatible user interfaces. Of course, the ideal vision rarely happens: for example, single sign-on remains an elusive chimera, though companies are closer and closer to achieving it every time we study this problem.

Slow Mobile Progress

Anybody wanting to launch a mobile intranet portal is advised to heed the strong finding from our research with mobile websites: Good mobile usability requires a separate design with a reduced feature set for mobile use cases, focusing on time- and location-dependent tasks. It's not enough to make an existing portal accessible through phones because the UI is optimized for desktop use.

As an example, a university in our study was considering a mobile feature that would let students use their phones to check their meal plan credits and the cafeteria lines. Although these might not be mission-critical features in the average company, helping students eat might well be a killer mobile app for a university. The key point is to start with a task analysis of users' actual mobile needs, rather than simply trying to shoehorn everything onto the tiny screens.

One of our new case studies had previously hosted a half-baked mobile user experience on its portal. Realizing this, team members identified mobile as a requirement for the new portal. To their credit, they decided to wait and do it right later. Having tried and failed before, they knew just how hard it is to do.

Most of the companies we studied saw true mobile portals as being at least a few years out. And many planned to have sales-force support as one of the initial features.

I fully agree with the idea of waiting until you can get it right; poor mobile designs are really miserable for users. And for enterprise use, you pay for every minute employees waste slugging through a bad UI. Still, I advise companies to plan to make their intranets mobile sooner rather than later. As employees increasingly see rapid improvements in their mobile user experiences on the open Internet, they'll demand it from their organizations as well.

Governance Suffering

The only universal conclusion actually relates to this lack of perfect governance solutions: Anybody who attempts to sell you one is hawking snake oil.

Instead, the recommendation is to take general governance solutions that have worked in our various case studies and adapt them to your organization's specific corporate culture and other circumstances.

For example, Duke Energy has 5 layers of governance:

• New Media team: oversees and governs the user experience; trains new content owners; reviews sites to ensure compliance with standards; and consults on how sites can add more value, keep their content up to date, and implement new technologies or social features.
• Site managers (throughout the business): responsible for the content on their sites.
• Internal Communication Department: manages the homepage content.
• Portal steering team (made up of VPs and directors from Communications, HR, IT, and Marketing): helps prioritize enhancements based on business value and manage the organizational and technical impacts of enhancements; meets monthly.
• Portal executive council (made of Sr. VPs from Communications, HR, and IT): approves long-term strategy, allocates funding, and advocates for portal initiatives with the senior leadership team; meets quarterly or on demand.

The need for ongoing portal maintenance and continuous quality improvement has an important implication: the portal is a job, not an ancillary project. There must be someone — or possibly an entire department in a big company — whose formal job description includes the portal.

In our previous research, when we asked who owns the intranet, the answer was often some combination of IT, marketing, and HR. In this round, we found the responsibility shifting more consistently toward corporate communications, with IT playing a logical (and necessary) custodian role, providing consulting on technology decisions and portal support. Cross-department portal ownership also worked well in several of our case studies. Even when this arrangement was informal, the most successful portal projects seem to involve cross-functional business owners or steering committee members.

When it comes to aging or overburdened intranets, organizations tend to follow the old adage: "If it ain't broke don't fix it." But when the intranet does break and the solution is a new portal, that portal can transform not only the intranet, but the organization as well. One reason is that portals need a strong governance structure to support them, and instituting a portal solution can drive the need for a governance structure that once might have seemed a luxury.

At ANZ, for example, the project to field a new portal required adapting project models such as Six Sigma, user-centered design, and centralized publishing. These better ways of managing the intranet resulted in user experience improvements: staff were able to complete tasks an average of 50% faster and the number of unsuccessful attempts to find information decreased by almost 70%. Given the number of employees in such a big financial services company, these are ROI numbers you can take to the bank.

(As further discussed in our report on ROI for usability, the annualized value of a design improvement that saves t minutes in time-on-task is t×e×n×s, where e = the number of employees performing that task, n = the number of times per year a typical employee performs the task, and s = the average employee's loaded salary per minute. In a big company, a good redesign can be worth tens of millions, which helps make the t×e×n×s formula easy to remember.)

Although big organizations get the biggest ROI from intranet improvements, they might suffer under a particular type of ambition inertia: upper management has often been in the same company for a decade or more, so they've never experienced how good intranets can get in other companies. This can make them reluctant to sponsor a new portal. (In contrast, for public websites and regular software, executives have personal experience with Amazon.com, Google, and the like, making them painfully aware of their own offerings' user experience shortfalls.)

One obvious way to reignite ambitions is to study other portals and build a vision of "what can be." That's one of the main goals of our work.

Personalization Becomes Critical

Why this change? More stuff!

Information overload might be a cliché, but it's also a truth. Even without portals, employees are drowning in information. Paradoxically, portals can become a victim of their own success as they become capable of integrating ever-more sources of information and applications. The more the portal serves up to the users, the stronger the need to curate what each person sees, or they'll truly be overwhelmed.

For example, ANZ operates in 32 countries. While it's good to integrate siloed information, Australian employees don't typically need to see New Zealand information in their search results. Personalization can achieve this.

Unfortunately, effective personalization is a tough nut to crack. Even though leading portal software platforms offer personalization features, you shouldn't underestimate how much work is needed to fully implement them.

Many portals in our study experimented with customization — either in addition to personalization or as an alternative. (With personalization, the portal automatically determines what to show, whereas customization requires users to manually choose various features.) Letting users make their own choices sounds good, but in practice, customization usually works poorly: business professionals are busy and often see the need to mess with UI preferences as an annoyance.

A frequent compromise is to offer a My Page feature. Many users are familiar with this design pattern from public websites. Initially, each user's My Page can be populated through role-based personalization, with additional customization available that lets users add and subtract content widgets and control the look and feel of their pages. (If you choose this option, be aware that many users will simply use the default My Page without customizing it.)

From Social Features to Collaboration Platform

It's important to remember the crucial importance of these old tools and to continue making them more effective. But at the same time, portals have also evolved into collaboration platforms in their own right, paralleling the growth of social features on the open Internet.

Many portals include some Web-like social features that simply help employees get to know each other, which brings its own business benefits. But goal-driven collaboration is even more important. At the law firm Goodwin Procter, collaboration was a key driver for the new intranet: the goal was to get attorneys to collaborate and reuse information so they'd be more efficient and keep billing costs down.

Are social features and collaboration features really separate on portals? In most of our case studies, companies didn't sharply distinguish between the two. The stronger distinction might be that between informal vs. formal collaboration. For example, at Cisco, formal content is officially managed, whereas informal content is left to emerge as it may. However you draw the line, the portal's transformation into a collaborative platform makes this one of the new governance issues that must be addressed.Cisco was also a leading-edge case study through its integration of multimedia and real-time formats in the collaboration platform, including its own TelePresence video technology.

Robust Enterprise Portals

Well, that's the ideal, anyway. Most case studies are not quite there yet, but they're making good progress.

Learn More

Full-day tutorial on Intranet Usabilityat the annualUsability Week conference.

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A year after our first usability study of iPad apps, it's nice to see that iPad user interfaces have become decidedly less wacky. It's even better to see good uptake of several of our recommendations from last year, including apps with:

• back buttons,
• broader use of search,
• homepages, and
• direct access to articles by touching headlines on the front page.

One of the worst designs last year was USA Today's section navigation, which required users to touch the newspaper logo despite the complete lack of any perceived affordance that the logo would have this effect. During our new testing earlier this month, several users had the same problems as last year's test participants, even though we recruited people with more iPad experience.

Happily, a few days after our test sessions, USA Today released a new version of their app, with somewhat improved navigation:

USA Today section navigation.
Left: As tested a year ago and earlier this month.
Right: The new design with an explicit Sections button.

One of our test users was a regular user of this app. Although he said he'd eventually discovered the section navigation on his own, during the test session he complained bitterly about how difficult it had been to find. Users rarely remember the details of interaction design widgets, which is one of the key reasons that it's better to watch users than to ask them about usability. The fact that this user recalled his troubles months later is testament to how strikingly annoying the old navigation design was. It's also astonishing that it took a full year to get this usability flaw changed after we originally reported it.

User Research

Our original research necessarily tested users who had no prior experience using iPads. A complete lack of experience is obviously not representative of typical tablet usability. At this point, even first-time users of websites or apps will have visited many websites before on the iPad and will have used many apps before opening a new app for the first time.

For the new study, we recruited users with at least 2 months' experience using their iPads. Typically, we recruit people with at least a year's experience. However, because the iPad was released only slightly more than a year before our study, anybody with a full year's experience would have been a very early adopter — and thus completely unrepresentative of mainstream users.

In any case, 2 months' iPad use is definitely enough to learn the user interface conventions and to have racked up substantial time using touchscreen apps.

A second difference between the two studies is that we originally tested the launch applications that shipped at the same time as the iPad itself; they were thus developed by teams working in isolation under Apple-imposed secrecy that prevented them from gaining user feedback. In our first report, many of the bad designs we documented were due not to bad designers, but rather to the inevitable outcome of non-user-centered design projects.

In contrast, the apps and sites tested in the new study were designed by teams that benefited both from our original usability report and from whatever user feedback they'd collected on their own during the past year.

In the new study, we systematically tested 26 iPad apps and 6 websites. We also tested many other apps that our test participants had installed on their iPads, but these tests were less systematic, with typically only a single user per application.

In total, 16 iPad users participated in the new study. Half were men, half were women. The age distribution was fairly even for 14 users between the ages of 21–50 years; we also had 2 users older than 50. Occupations spanned the gamut, from personal chef to realtor to vice president of human resources.

Our insights about iPad usability are further informed by findings from various client studies and by many aspects of last year's original research, which continue to be relevant.

Replicated Findings

• Read–tap asymmetry for websites, with content that was large enough to read but too small to tap. We did see some examples across a few websites that were designed to work well on tablets, with bigger touchable areas. For example, Virgin America's reservation page let users touch anywhere in the entire table cell containing a desired departure, as opposed to having to touch the much smaller area represented by the radio button (or even its label).
• Websites worked fairly well in the standard iPad browser as long as users didn't have complex tasks; focusing on reading and looking at pictures or video was relatively easy. (If your service requires substantial interaction, consider an app instead of a site.)
• Touchable areas were too small in many apps, as well as too close together, increasing the risk of touching the wrong one.
• Accidental activation due to unintended touches again caused trouble, particularly in apps lacking a Back button.
• Low discoverability, with active areas that didn't look touchable.
• Users disliked typing on the touchscreen and thus avoided the registration process.

New Findings

Swipe ambiguity plagued users when multiple items on the same screen could be swiped. Carousels often caused this usability problem in apps that also relied on swiping to move between pages. Many users couldn't turn the page because they swiped in the wrong spot. Their typical conclusion? The app is broken.

Many apps squeezed information into too-small areas, making it harder to recognize and manipulate. In a related problem, apps featured too much navigation. This design problem was so prevalent that it deserves its own acronym: TMN. While it's true that our training course on navigation design covers 25 different navigation techniques, any given user interface should contain only a few. These two problems interact, because a larger number of navigation options gives each one less space.

One example of excess navigation is the content popovers that many apps use to display thumbnails of available articles. Sometimes the popovers appear as menus or carousels, and sometimes they work by scrubbing a slider. Whatever the implementation, these long lists of thumbnails had lower usability than homepage-like tables of contents, which users could return to when they wanted to navigate to different locations rather than simply continuing with the next article.

Tablets Are Shared Devices

The iPad's shared nature contrasts with the much more personal nature of mobile phones, which are typically owned and used by single individuals.

Obviously, tablets might become truly personal devices in the future as competition drives down the prices. But for now, you should assume that you're designing for a multi-user device. For example, users might be reluctant to stay permanently signed in on an app, and they'll still forget their passwords. It's also important to design recognizable application icons so they'll stand out in the crowded listings of several users' apps.

What Are iPads Used For?

A common characteristic of all this iPad use is that it's heavily dominated by media consumption, except for the small amount of production involved in responding to emails.

About half the users carried the iPad with them frequently; the other half used it mainly at home or on longer trips.

We've come far in just a year. iPad usability is much improved, and people habitually use many apps. As always, this is no reason to relax our vigilance; new usability problems have appeared and the old ones haven't been totally vanquished. Mainly, though, the future is bright for touch-driven tablet user experience.

Learn More

293-page report on Usability of Mobile Websites and Applications with 210 design guidelines and 479 screenshots is available for download.

Full-day training courses at the annual Usability Week conference:

• Mobile User Experience 1: Usability of Websites and Apps on Mobile Devices,
• Mobile User Experience 2: Touchscreen Application Usability
• Visual Design for Mobile Devices and Tablets (2-day course)
• Writing for Mobile Users: Content Usability for Mobile Websites, Apps, and Email Newsletters
• Mobile Usability Methods: How to Run Your Own Mobile User Studies

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When we designed our 2-day seminar on application design, we partitioned the topic into 2 parts: workflow and screen components.

The second topic is easy to understand: it covers everything from individual controls, such as radio buttons and checkboxes, to more complex composites of widgets, such as forms design, to the layout of these controls. All very tangible.

Workflow is much more abstract, but actually more important for the application's ultimate success. We're no longer talking about visible stuff on the screen, but rather about user movements among various features. Workflow theory ranges from simple concepts, such as progressive disclosure, to thorny ideas, such as inductive vs. deductive interfaces.

To illustrate the importance of workflow design, I'll offer several concrete examples from recent user testing in varied domains. As the examples illustrate, effective workflow design builds on a simple principle: Have things happen when users expect them — either because of their existing expectations or because you've clearly communicated what to expect. (The former is obviously better; instructions automatically degrade the user experience by diverting users' attention from their main task.)

Premature Requests: Asking Users Before They're Ready

Uniformly, users press Don't Allow.

People get enough junk already. After years of Web usage, people are extraordinarily weary of companies spamming them with "selected offers."

In addition to engendering dramatically stronger customer loyalty by reminding them to use the iPad app, push notifications often provide helpful information that users might appreciate. So why would they refuse good stuff that could enhance the value of having a tablet?

Because the opt-in prompt appeared at the wrong stage of the workflow: it was grossly premature.

The prompt appears when users open the newly installed app — which is, by definition, before they've actually experienced the application and understood its value. At this early stage, users have a very low level of commitment to the app. You can't ask them for much, because they don't think much of you yet.

Our user research with mobile apps has shown that they're often intermittent-use applications. People download many more apps than they actually use with any frequency. And users know this; they're not going to let an app impose an eternal burden on them when an a priori assessment shows that it'll likely be one of the many apps that they don't really use.

(Yes, it's possible to turn off push notifications later, but most users either don't know how to change system settings or don't want to bother.)

So, a much more fruitful approach is to first build up some credibility capital with users by offering a useful service. Once users have grown to really like you and know they'd actually benefit from updates, you can ask them to opt-in for push notifications.

Another example along these same lines: For many years, it's been a key guideline for e-commerce checkout to let customers make purchases as "guests" rather than requiring them to become registered users of the site. When making an initial purchase, people aren't yet sufficiently committed to a company to accept the hassle of registering. (Later, after a few purchases, they'll probably register if appropriately prompted to do so.)

Final example: in our testing of B2B sites, business professionals usually rebel when a site attempts to collect lead information too early in the sales process — before the (prospective) customer has decided to admit the vendor to the shortlist. Premature request = no leads at all, as users proceed to more welcoming sites.

Questions That Only Make Sense Later

Knowing that the name would be widely displayed and not just used as a login credential would prevent people from being stuck with unfortunate names like SuperStud on a professional site.

There's a fairly easy fix here: simply explain to users how each piece of information will be used. You might, for example, show them a sample of how their profile and postings will look, and let users edit their entries before committing to register. (Of course, any such instructional text should be concise and thoroughly tested, as we know users allocate minimal attention to instructions.)

Many Web-based applications are ephemeral applications, meaning that users view them as low-commitment transient encounters: a quick in/quick out of something they've never seen before and might never see again.

In this environment, we frequently observe usability problems caused by users' weak mental models of the application workflow. People don't know what's coming later, and they often don't even understand the application's purpose. It's thus hard for them to correctly answer early questions and they have little motivation to slog through set-up features.

One obvious answer to these problems is to reduce the set-up burden and enhance the usability of the early-use phase. Think of a gently sloping on-ramp rather than a wall that users have to climb.

Even the best designs can't create perfect usability where everybody understands everything without any effort whatsoever. The goal is to set the stage for users to understand the workflow, without slowing them down. Clearly, this is one of the toughest challenges in online communications.

Better Workflow = More Use

Thus, one reason to care about workflow is simply that usability is enhanced when you consider the totality of the user experience and not just stand-alone screens.

But there's also a more business-oriented argument for improving workflow usability: users can often overcome isolated usability problems, but a broken workflow is much harder for them to fix. Among the typical consequences of bad workflow design are

• undiscovered errors that occur when users don't relate what happened on screen A with a (much-later) screen B;
• abandonment, where users simply give up on something they don't understand; and
• frustration, which arises when an awkward process takes much more time than it should. (Individual design elements can also delay users, but a poor workflow takes considerably longer to complete.)

Learn More

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The 10 best-designed intranets for 2011 are:

• AMP Limited (Australia), a wealth management company
• Bennett Jones LLP (Canada), one of Canada's largest law firms
• Bouygues Telecom (France), a telecom, mobile, fixed, TV, and Internet communications services company
• Credit Suisse AG (Switzerland), a global financial services company
• Duke Energy (US), an electrical power holding company
• Habitat for Humanity International (US), a non-profit, non-denominational Christian housing ministry
• Heineken International (The Netherlands), a leading brewer and owner and manager of a portfolio of beer brands
• KT (Republic of Korea), an information, communications, and technology company
• Mota-Engil Engenharia e Construção, S.A. (Portugal), a leading construction enterprise
• Verizon Communications (US), a provider of wired and wireless broadband and communications services to US consumers, as well as of global business networking, data, and managed solutions to enterprises worldwide

(This may sound like a lot of repeats, but this is the 11^th Intranet Design Annual and we've had 110 winning slots in all. So, the 5 companies who've won twice correspond to just 4.5%, making these few companies the elite of the elite.)

This year's winning sites include two specialized sites. Mota-Engil's winning site is its InnovCenter, a site aimed at creating and implementing innovative ideas. Heineken's winning site is its BrandPortal, which is used to share marketing and brand assets worldwide.

This is our most international group of Intranet Design Annual winners yet, with companies from 8 different countries, including our first winners from Korea and Portugal.

Although European intranets and financial-sector intranets both put in a poor performance last year, Europe has certainly made a strong comeback with 40% of this year's winners; it's also nice to see strong financial-services intranets again.

Smaller Companies Get Better Intranets

The average size of this year's winning organizations is 37,900 employees. This is remarkably close to the previous two years' averages of 37,500 (2009) and 39,100 (2010, excluding the outlier Walmart, with its 1.4 million store associates). On average, recent winners have been less than half the size of the winners from 2005–2008, when the average size was 76,250 employees.

Although 37,900 employees is certainly not a small organization, the fact that recent winners are half as big as past winners is a remarkable change. How is it that smaller companies now achieve such excellence in intranet design? Partly, it's a reflection of increased investments in intranets (see the team size discussion below), and partly it's a consequence of better tools for building intranets. The easier it is to make the implementation work, the more resources are left for design and usability. This is especially important in smaller organizations, which were harder pressed to make things work with clunkier technology.

The average size of the winning teams was 14 people this year. (Same as last year.) This is about twice the size of the winning intranet teams 10 years ago, when the winning companies were typically bigger.

One cautionary observation: many winners supplemented their intranet teams with outside resources — such as design firms and consultants — for their redesign projects. While this makes sense, there is a danger in staffing down the intranet after launch. Long-term usability requires ongoing commitment, both for continuous design improvement, and for things such as search quality initiatives, consistency and style guide enforcement, and training new content contributors.

Mobile Intranets

In testing mobile websites on mobile devices, we found that sites with fewer features have much better usability than full-featured websites. This year's winning mobile intranets followed this recommendation, focusing on specific features that were important to employees on the go instead of trying to squeeze the entire intranet onto a tiny screen.

One major difference between mobile intranets and mobile websites is that an intranet team can optimize for the relatively small set of company-issued mobile devices. The result? Substantially more emphasis on Blackberry support for intranets than for websites.

Knowledge Management

• Knowledge sharing. Offering repositories for case studies, samples, and other existing information can help people with similar problems avoid having to start building their solutions from scratch. Examples range from Habitat for Humanity's fundraising templates to Bennett Jones' Share Your Work widget. Sometimes, knowledge sharing can be as simple as a Q&A tool to connect employees with questions to colleagues with answers.
• Innovation management. Companies managed and encouraged innovation by offering users tools for taking ideas and improvements from conception to completion. Indeed, this is the sole purpose of Mota-Engil's winning InnovCenter. Verizon offers a mobile version to capture ideas as they occur, which is often on outside jobs, far from any old-fashioned suggestion box.
• Comments. The simplest way to inspire user-contributed intranet content is to let employees comment on existing information, ranging from news stories to knowledge bank resources. Commenting features reduce the fear of the blank screen; systems that force people to create content from scratch every time inhibit user participation.
• Ratings. Giving a grade requires even less work than writing a comment, and thus rating systems can further broaden user participation. Sites that use ratings can list top-rated resources first in menus or give them added weight in search listings. Mota-Engil and Verizon offered an even simpler approach by noting how many users had previously accessed a resource (even if they had not rated it). Sometimes, bad content gets substantial use simply because it addressees a key need; on average, however, better stuff gets used more, so a usage count is a reasonable proxy for quality — and has the huge benefit of requiring no extra effort from users.
• Participation rewards. We know from research on social features that user participation increases when contributors are visibly rewarded, such as by adding points or badges to their profiles. Many winning intranets did exactly that. Because there's real business value to features like knowledge sharing and innovation management within an enterprise, some intranets went beyond the symbolic value of visible recognition and offered real prizes to employees who gathered sufficient participation points.
• Customized collections. The default intranet information architecture (IA) must be based on the average employee's tasks and usage patterns, but can never predict any individual user's information needs with 100% accuracy. To contend with this fact, designers often allowed users to customize content collections.

Although more in the area of general social features than knowledge management, several winning sites offered features that let employees create and share video content. This builds on the trend we've noticed for several years toward increased use of video on intranets.

Continued Trends

• A wide spectrum of technology solutions: there's no single way to build a great intranet.
• Better-structured intranets based on task-centered IAs, often breaking up a legacy of information silos.
• Reliance on user research methods — including user testing, personas, and card sorting — both for design decisions in general and IA decisions in particular.
• News as a main homepage feature, but with increasing emphasis on the usefulness of news stories.
• Better employee profile pages. In addition to offering information beyond plain contact listings, profiles were typically coupled with a more structured way of finding employees with specific expertise.
• Blogs by both executives and regular employees.
• Emphasis on search and on initiatives to improve search quality (which continues to suffer on many intranets).
• The use of pre-designed page layouts and a CMS to establish and maintain content consistency.
• Training for site managers and people in charge of individual areas, in recognition of that fact that UX quality derives from people and not just technology.
• Content curators assigned to keep specific pages up-to-date.
• Intranet branding, typically with somewhat functional names, such as BenNet, BrandPortal, the Hub, InnovCenter, kate2.0, My.Habitat, the Portal, and Wooby.

ROI

There were impressive ROI indicators across this year's winners. On the AMP intranet, for example, use of search increased by 300% after the search feature was improved. Because we know that users are quick to abandon poor search features, this is a strong indication that the new search is better at getting people the information they need. Although a 300% increase in search use is a huge jump, it's not an unprecedented magnitude of growth in the annals of usability ROI when a team really focuses on improving a key feature.

Decreased use can also be a good ROI indicator. For example, Habitat for Humanity saw a 60% drop in "where do I find…?" questions after launching its improved design. A sure indication that users are getting the content they need more often.

Sometimes ROI is quite indirect. In the case of Bennett Jones, the direct benefits of an improved intranet — with increasingly useful knowledge management — come from helping lawyers better do their job. But indirect benefits accrue in areas as diverse as sales and recruiting: Potential clients want law firms to show evidence of efficient technology use to hold down billable hours, and promising law school graduates ask recruiters about the level of technology support they can expect from a given firm.

Full Report

See also: This year's Intranet Design Annual.

Learn More

The conference also has a full-day seminar on Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability and a 2-day course on Information Architecture (IA), which mostly are just as applicable to intranets.

We cover the underlying research that explains why certain UIs work or don't work in the seminars on The Human Mind and Usability: How Your Customers Thinkand From Science to Design: Applying HCI Principles to Real World Problems.

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College students are an important target audience for many websites. They're young, they're about town, they spend whatever money they have (often online), and they frequently look for many different types of information. For sure, they're an online generation spending — or squandering — large amounts of time on the Web.

User Research

• Freie Universität Berlin
• Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Miramar College
• Mesa Community College
• San Diego State University
• Southwestern College
• Thames Valley University
• University of California, San Diego
• University of London
• University of Reading
• University of Sydney
• University of Wisconsin

We used two different research methods:

1. User testing: We asked participants to perform tasks while thinking aloud. These tests were conducted as one-on-one sessions in a conference room with the study facilitator sitting next to the student. Sessions encompassed two types of tasks:
   • Open-ended tasks, mainly based on the user's own activities. For these tasks, users could go to any website(s) they wanted. Examples include:
     • Find out how to get a student visa
     • Find application requirements for law school
   • Site-specific tasks. Users were asked to go to a predetermined site and carry out a given task. Examples include:
     • There are many things to take care of for your new apartment, including turning on gas and power. Go to www.sdge.com to see what you need to do to get gas and electricity at your new apartment.
     • The following companies are participating in a job fair at your school next week. You want to learn more about them before you give them your resume. See if you can find interesting information about the companies. [Followed by a list of corporate sites.]
     • [On the university's site] Find out when the spring semester begins. Find the hours for the book store.
     • Your friend was just diagnosed with asthma. He has difficulty breathing when he exercises. His doctor says there are several treatment options. Go to www.advair.com and www.mysymbicort.com and see if they have information that you can pass along to your friend.
2. In-home recordings: Participants recorded all of their online activities for two days, using screen-recording software, and sent us a hard drive with the resulting files. This approach gave us insight into the students' context of use.

Myths about Student Internet Use

Myth 1: Students Are Technology Wizards

College students avoid Web elements that they perceive as "unknown" for fear of wasting time. Students are busy and grant themselves little time on individual websites. They pass over areas that appear too difficult or cumbersome to use. If they don't perceive an immediate payoff for their efforts, they won't click on a link, fix an error, or read detailed instructions.

In particular, students don't like to learn new user interface styles. They prefer websites that employ well-known interaction patterns. If a site doesn't work in the expected manner, most students lose patience and leave rather than try to decode a difficult design.

Myth 2: Students Crave Multimedia and Fancy Design

One website started to play music automatically, but our student user immediately turned it off. She said, "The website is very bad. It skips. It plays over itself. I don't want to hear that anymore."

Students often judge sites on how they look. But they usually prefer sites that look clean and simple rather than flashy and busy. One user said that websites should "stick to simplicity in design, but not be old-fashioned. Clear menus, not too many flashy or moving things because it can be quite confusing."

Students don't go for fancy visuals and they definitely gravitate toward one very plain user interface: the search engine. Students are strongly search dominant and turn to search at the smallest provocation in terms of difficult navigation.

Myth 3: Students Are Enraptured by Social Networking

But that doesn't mean they want everything to be social. Students associate Facebook and similar sites with private discussions, not with corporate marketing. When students want to learn about a company, university, government agency, or non-profit organization they turn to search engines to find that organization's official website. They don't look for the organization's Facebook page.

Teenagers vs. College Students

However, for the purpose of usability studies and design guidelines, our definition of "teenager" encompasses only users aged 13–18. College students aged 18–24 are a different group that requires different guidelines because they exhibit different behaviors than the teens we've studied.

Play vs. Work

College students are much more goal-oriented. They like interactivity only when it serves a purpose and supports their current tasks. At the college level, users make a separation between play and work and don't require websites to entertain them at all times. Instead, students consider websites as tools. A good site is one that helps them quickly accomplish their goals.

Reading

Here's what one student said about the US National Science Foundation's site: "There is a lot of writing. This site is very overwhelming. It's really hard to find things that will benefit me." And here's another student's comments on Wiley Interscience: "I don't like that [the page] is really, really long, want to just focus on one thing." Finally, here's a student's take on the BBC's website, which I've previously praised for good headlines: "Headings in long texts are good; break it up so you can read what you're interested in."

Although college students typically have high literacy skills, this isn't necessarily true of all 18–24 years-old users. About 40% of people in this age group have low literacy skills and will have difficulty reading anything beyond simple sentence structures. Thus, if you're targeting all young adults (as opposed to students only), follow the guidelines for writing for a broad consumer audience.

Age-Appropriate Content

Designing for students doesn't require nearly that level of age-specific targeting, but it is important to write for young people. Both in terms of style and in terms of topics, students expect different coverage than would be appropriate for older audiences or seasoned business professionals. But don't force yourself to be hip. That doesn't pass the smell test. And do respect the fact that students are adults.

Corporate websites' careers areas should have a special "students" section if they want to attract interns or new graduates. Content targeted at young people makes them feel more welcome and open to browsing the site. Being too formal or featuring only senior positions has the opposite effect. For example, one student felt that a leading management consultancy's site "doesn't look like it's within reach of recent graduates."

Skepticism

Not all students trust or believe everything they read on the first website they hit. In fact, many students were skeptical or turned off by websites that lacked depth and detail, or didn't answer their questions.

Whereas younger users don't always recognize advertising, students have a keen eye for ads and don't like being tricked by sites that don't clearly differentiate between editorial and advertising. Here's one student's comment on the eHow site: "I think that they have a lot of ads, which is kind of annoying. It kind of is difficult to distinguish what's the ad and what's actually on the website."

This doesn't mean that students dislike all ads. In the study, they appreciated ads and offers that appealed to them and were relevant to their current goals. For example, one student liked a fashion ad because "it's more up-to-date and specific to what I want."

Despite their general level of skepticism, most students suffered from Google Gullibility where they often uncritically selected the first result returned on the SERP (search engine results page).

Multitasking

Student users' high inclination to multitask and low patience reinforce the need for quick, responsive, and easy Web design. Don't give students even the smallest excuse to check Facebook instead of staying with your site.

When students "multitask," they don't do so in the true sense of doing several things simultaneously. Rather, they perform frequent context-switches between various on-going tasks, but work on only a single website at any given time.

No International Differences

Of course, there are language differences, so a localized design remains superior to having a single, worldwide site.

Students coming from foreign countries are usually not native-language speakers. This means that they require simpler language than locally born users. In particular, it's important to avoid jargon, complex words and sentence structures, and puns and colloquialisms.

Learn More

More on tone-of-voice in Web content in the full-day seminar Writing for the Web 2at the annualUsability Week conference.

A few cities also feature a seminar on Non-Profit Organizations' Web Presence: Attracting Donations, Volunteers, and Catering to Diverse Stakeholders. Not about students, but relevant to many university websites.

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Email newsletters remain the Internet's best tool for supplementing a website. The two media forms are supplementary:

Newsletters	Websites
Push	Pull
News	Research
Relationship	Fulfillment

4 Rounds of User Research

• Study 1 (8 years ago): Lab-based testing with 15 participants, focusing on the subscribe and unsubscribe processes, as well as receiving and opening newsletters.
• Study 2 (6 years ago): Diary study with 30 participants in 6 countries (Australia, China, Japan, Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S.) examining the role of email newsletters in subscribers' daily lives over a 4-week period.
• Study 3 (4 years ago): Eyetracking study with 42 participants and a field study with 6 participants; the focus was on how people read (or, mainly, scan) email inboxes and newsletter content.
• Study 4 (new): Lab-based testing with 16 users in the U.S. and the U.K., including testing with mobile devices and exploring the impact of tone-of-voice in newsletter content.

Old Findings Confirmed

As usual with any replicated user research, we did find some changes and additional insights – even for "old" topics such as the subscription interface and subject line. The number of newsletter usability guidelines has grown from 149 to 199. (The bar for acceptable user experience keeps being raised.)

But most new findings were in areas that have risen to prominence since our previous study: social networks, video, and mobile access. I'll focus on these new topics later, but first we'll look at two key issues: the sheer amount of email that users receive and how usability is evolving over time.

Email: Ever-Increasing

It's clear that users are falling further behind in keeping up with their email. This doesn't change the old guidelines regarding the importance of using clear "from" and "subject" lines to ensure your messages attract attention; in fact, busier inboxes simply make these guidelines even more important. In the past, a newsletter might have gotten away with a generic or spammy subject line. Today, that same design will doom it.

One poor subject line came from InterContinental Hotels: "Open Your (I)s to the Wonders of the Sea." Yes, it's a clever allusion to the "(I)" in the company's logo, and if users take the time, they'll likely figure out to read this as "eyes." But while dashing through their inboxes, people simply don't have time for word plays, puns, and the like. Also, to entice users to open a message, the subject needs vastly stronger information scent than "wonders of the sea," which can mean anything.

In addition to subject lines, users now pay more attention to message previews. This change is partly driven by the increasing email volume (users can decide whether to dispose of or keep messages without opening them all) and partly driven by more mobile access (users can't see much on a small screen).

It's always been a guideline to start a newsletter with the most important stuff, but the increased use of previews makes it even more important to focus on high-value content at the start of a message, since users are less likely now to look beyond it. (It almost goes without saying that "high-value" is judged based on what's valuable to the recipients – not on what you feel like promoting today.)

Newsletter Usability Improvements

• Study 1 (8 years ago): 79% success rate; task time 5:04 (minutes:seconds).
• Study 3 (4 years ago): 81% success rate; task time 4:03.
• Study 4 (now): 85% success rate; task time 3:32.

When user experience metrics improve over time, there are two possible explanations: higher-usability design or higher-skilled users. In the case of email newsletters, there's probably a bit of both. But, overall, users don't seem to be much savvier now regarding newsletter subscriptions than they were 8 years ago.

So, the main explanation for the improved performance is probably that websites are indeed getting better at designing to attract newsletter subscribers. One data point to support this assessment comes from our analysis of political campaign newsletters from national elections in 2004 and 2010. Averaged across the parties, the newsletters' compliance with our usability guidelines was:

• 2004: 57%
• 2010: 60%

Competing With Social Networks

• A newsletter goes into the inbox and sits there, whereas social networks use a stream-based interface metaphor, where new postings constantly replace old ones.
• As we found when testing social networks, people turn to these services primarily to keep in touch with friends and family, and corporate content is often mismatched with this mindset.
• Newsletters are under your control design-wise and hold much more information. One user offered the following comparison of newsletters and Facebook updates: "You get a lot more information in newsletters than on Facebook. Facebook to me is more just a general one-liner about something that's going on versus a newsletter that contains content and details on a variety of topics and subjects."

Although users weren't really interested in receiving company updates through social networks, they are information sources that compete for people's attention. Some users reported hearing about breaking news through Facebook before they received a news alert via email.

Your newsletter subscribers are usually your most loyal customers and fans, so it's important to treat them better than the more fickle audience on social networks. Obviously, having enhanced content in the newsletter is one way of doing so. But you should also make sure to send out the newsletter announcing, say, sales or new products before tweeting such news.

On the positive side, your newsletter can confer social advantages to subscribers: you can feed them tidbits that they can post to their own contacts, making them feel more informed. This rewards your most loyal followers, while still spreading your message on social services.

Mobile Use: Quick Reads, Slow Reads

The new study replicated this old finding. Many users read newsletters on their mobile devices when they had time to spare. In these circumstances, some users said that they were more willing to look at longer content than they'd normally read while processing email on their desktop computers.

On the other hand, much mobile use is characterized by even more time pressure than desktop use. People often check email on mobile devices during quick breaks when they want to allocate time only to high-priority messages.

Thus, some newsletters should be even more quick and to-the-point for mobile use, while others can afford to present more leisurely content. It might be better to do one or the other rather than aim for a middle-of-the-road approach that will satisfy neither usage scenario.

One big problem in the latest study was that many newsletters were poorly formatted for reading on small mobile screens. Indeed, people rated the ease of reading newsletters on their mobile devices a miserable 3.3 on a 1–7 scale.

Video in Email

In most cases, newsletter videos should be secondary and supplementary to text and images that users can scan directly in the newsletter. To set proper user expectations, the design must make it absolutely clear whether something links to a video or to an article.

Users were hesitant to click on videos within newsletters if they weren't sure what they would get. It's important to clearly describe the video in words. Also, carefully pick a preview image that communicates the video's nature instead of simply showing the first frame. Finally, state the video's duration.

Long Live the Internet (and Your Newsletter)

50% of our users said that email newsletters influenced their B2B purchases, but the influence was only occasional, when the timing happened to be right. Often, the newsletter served to grow or retain a vendor's reputation or to maintain a relationship during dry spells when users lacked the budgets needed to actively conduct business.

When it comes to customer relationships, newsletters must be seen as a long-term investment: they work their magic over time. On the strategic level, this is why you should emphasize value-added publishing instead of simply spamming too-frequent newsletters to any email address you can lay your hands on. On a more tactical level, it's why you should follow old guidelines like keeping the same URL year after year, instead of building (and abandoning) new microsites every season.

Learn More

Full-day tutorial on newsletter usabilityat the annualUsability Week conference. (Only offered in certain cities because of the highly specialized nature of this topic, so check the city agenda of your choice for whether the newsletter seminar is available.)

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