Social intranet design

Last year at this time, I first defined “social intranet” in a white paper,В  The Social Intranet:

An intranet that features multiple social media tools for most or all employees to use as collaboration vehicles for sharing knowledge with other employees. A social intranet may feature blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networking, or a combination of these or any other Web 2.0 (intranet 2.0) tool with at least some or limited exposure (optional) from the main intranet or portal home page.

Defining a social intranet is easy, and there have been plenty of others who’ve offered their definition since mine (none of them are particularly wrong, all with their own perspective). Designing a social intranet is substantially more difficult.В  Although, in my years of intranet design, and now social intranet design, I can tell you there’s little difference… because it’s namely about designing from the user’s perspective, and employees typically want the same thing.

Nine out of ten intranet home pages have too much on them: too much text, too many links, too many colors. Your intranet is probably one of them.

I’ve developed 7 principles of intranet design (they’re mine, but you can call them yours since I’ve developed them based on my work with dozens of intranet clients). Break them at your peril.

7 Principles of Intranet Design:

• Less is more.
• An intranet is a business system, and the design should fulfill business needs (no creative whim).
• Follow a design process that includes thorough input by management & employees, but design by committee leads to certain death.
• Soft corners instead of square corners (think navigation bar, buttons, photos).
• Soft colors are appreciated; darker, bolder colors such as dark red and black should be used with extreme prejudice.
• Employees love employee photos, not clip art: individual photos, team photos, event photos, etc.
• White space is good.

But what does a social intranet look like? How does it function? For content and examples see the video replay of our webinar Emergence of the Social Intranet (video replay, May 2010).

By the way, if you’ve missed some of our past webinars, you can access them for free (like the blog and white papers, it’s all free): Intranet webinars

VIEW MORE INTRANET SCREENSHOTS ON THE COMMUNEXIONS.COM “SOCIAL INTRANET” FORUM PHOTO GALLERY