Designing Your Intranet for Success

Properly implemented intranet design can be the difference between a critical business tool and a proverbial one that is on its death bed. The way the design team handles everything from planning to deployment determines how useful, intuitive and invaluable the platform is for your organization.

With so many intranet design ideas, you can wonder which design features are suitable for your site. Let us see some of the best practices you can employ during the implementation phase to make the intranet work as intended.

Responsive Design

Ideally, the intranet designs you choose should stimulate innovation and enhance cross-functional processes. It needs to be responsive to new devices and help teams overcome the setbacks of siloed departments.

Responsive modern intranet designs provide a single point of access for all organizational resources. It ensures users access people, documents, news, information, progress reports, and so much more through the intranet.

Consistency

When planning an intranet design that infuses team spirit and collaboration with employees, you need to be consistent in your features and message. If your goal is to promote a collaborative workplace culture, then you have to engineer the intranet in a way that fosters a collaborative space. That’s, it allows seamless sharing and access to files and remote project management among other activities that bolster collaboration.

You can search online for intranet design ideas or brainstorm with your time to come up with something agreeable. The ultimate design should be able to provide a consistent UX to end-users when using the platform.

Social Features

Modern intranet designs have social-media-like features that enable users to comment, like and share content. When mapping out the functional components of your intranet during the planning stage, remember to include key social features such as user profiles, instant messaging, profile status (online/offline) and the news feed.

Homepage Design

How do you create an intranet’s homepage to be responsive, slick and user-friendly? Most of us tend to blur the attractiveness of homepages by overcrowding it with news, notifications, events, and priorities.  Since it is the gateway to the digital workplace, it needs to be designed in a way that appeals to the workforce.

Design a homepage that is simple but feature-rich to facilitate user engagement and facilitate high usability. You can put features such as the Search Tool and upcoming events on the front page, but ensure that the overall design captures your business goals.  Here some of the things to include in your homepage:

• Upcoming events
• News and announcements
• Search tool
• Productivity tools (e.g. Planner)
• Quick links
• Social features

To create a winning intranet design, you have to team up with top intranet designers and architects. LS Intranet has expert designers who spend most of their time reviewing trends and intranet features that can foster internal communication, workflow management, employee engagement, and productivity.  Reach out to us to find out more. Meanwhile, you can try our DEMO!