Best Intranets of 2017: Trends for the Modern Intranet

The Nielsen Norman Group just released the results of its 16th Annual Intranet Design Awards. You can check out the winners here, but we were more interested in the trends that the Nielsen Norman Group found among the winners. As developers of Rise, Perficient’s approach to the modern intranet, we like to make sure we’re at the forefront of industry trends. Here’s what the Nielsen Norman Group found this year:
Agile Development
Among the winners, the average time spent on developing a new intranet was 1.4 years. This is in line with the past three years, but a huge drop from a high of 6.2 hours in 2011. The Nielsen Norman Group credits agile development strategy as a big contributing factor to the decline in project timelines, along with the improvement of intranet platforms that make it easy to quickly spin up sites – without a decrease in quality or security.

Smaller Internal Team Sizes
This trend is a bit tricky, as it doesn’t fully capture external team support. The average intranet development team size among the winners is 12 – the fewest since 2008. But, most teams relied on external consultants who weren’t taken into consideration, so the total number of people working on intranets is likely higher. This also represents a shift into more external outsourcing of development.
External Development
All of the winners worked with agencies and consulting firms to bring their intranets to life. On average, each winner worked with two external firms for tasks like card sorting, content migration, graphic design, navigation, SharePoint help, UX design, and more. Due to this growing reliance on third parties, the Nielsen Normal Group posed two questions to consider as intranets continue to modernize:

• Has intranet technology reached a level of complexity beyond what the average internal intranet team can handle?
• Do internal intranet team members lack adequate skills?

Check out the Nielsen Norman Group’s full trend analysis here.
Want to learn more about Perficient’s take on current intranet trends? Fill out the form below to download our guide.