Looks may not be everything, but when it comes to intranets they’re no mere matter of vanity in contributing to it’s overall effectiveness. IBF24 ran the My Beautiful Intranet competition for participants to uncover the most beautiful intranet, as judged by IBF’s Director of User Experience, William Hudson. Although there could only be one winner, William had this to say about the entries overall:
“All of these home pages were aesthetically appealing and had a good mix of news, images and exposed navigation to draw users further into the site.”
William announced the winners in the final half hour of IBF24, but if you weren’t there or you missed it, the winners were [drum roll]…
Runners up (in no particular order):
• RSA
• CapitalOne
• NATS
• AMP
And congratulations go to the winner, European Space Agency, which William described as “my intranet beauty: calm and sophisticated but with promise of inner charms by showing a reasonable amount of navigation in the left-hand panel”. It sounds rather like a fine wine! Giving a balanced assessment though he also said that “ESA should be careful that the colour combinations used provide adequate colour contrast (see http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/contrast-analyser.html)”
For those that didn’t make it into the winners list, William identified the following issues:
• A lack of exposed navigation
• Too many navigation components, panels, tabs and other “look at me” features
• (Or the other extreme) not engaging the user enough visually
• Underlining on text reducing legibility
• Important news items pushed too far down the page
• A lack of connection between images and text on news items
For both the most beautiful and the not quite so beautiful intranets, the key seems to be about achieving a balance among the various elements of the page – engaging users and drawing them in while at the same time not overpowering or confusing them. Thanks to all the participants for putting their intranet beauty on the line, and to William for his insights – if you attended IBF24 you can see screenshots of these intranets on the IBF24 site.
It was really pleasing to be chosen as runner up. We're looking forward to the arrival of our framed certificate (still!) - where is it???!
It really would be nice to hear from the IBF regarding the certificate.
Dom Wallis (NATS)
Posted by: Dom Wallis | July 23, 2008 at 06:28 AM
Hi Dom,
Congratulations on the beauty of your intranet! :-) I have it on good authority that the certificates are currently being printed and framed, and will be sent out early next week. So it can soon have pride of place on your office wall!
Best wishes,
Elizabeth
(elizabeth@ibforum.com)
Posted by: Elizabeth | July 23, 2008 at 04:01 PM