Design trends and must-haves for the modern intranet.

With web design evolving so fast it can be hard to keep your intranet looking fresh with the current design trends, but the good news is that it is now easier than ever to customise your intranet site with beautiful design and a user-friendly interface, increasing user adoption and boosting engagement.

Intranets often take a cue from web design, but in some areas intranets lead the way. Each year the Neilson Norman Group publishes the Intranet Design Annual, which selects ten winners in their Annual Intranet Design contest. Three strong trends in intranet features this year include:

Responsive Design and Mobile Considerations

This year saw an ever-increasing accessibility to certain pages from a mobile devisce. Not surprising given the steady increase in the mobile workforce.

Although you may not need to fully take a ‘mobile first’ approach, a well designed intranet will always give consideration to mobile access, and include many key mobile-friendly features. For example, OneSpace offer a mobile app which allows employees to log onto the intranet from their phone, perform key tasks such submitting IT tickets or leave requests, and access mobile friendly features such as forms, directory lookup and events. 

Agile Development

Agile development as an iterative process that breaks the work of building software into manageable “sprints” to achieve an end product that is well tested and more accurately meets the needs of end users.

The Design Annual found that among the winners, many were using an intranet that considers the need of the end users and have set short and long term goals to ensure everything is working as planned along the way. OneSpace out-of-the-box solution are created using agile development so you can benefit from time to value.

Mega Menu Navigation

A great tool to use for navigation, allowing users to quickly and easily find what they are looking for.

Winning intranet designs use top-level subcategories for each high-level category, along with a list of links to popular content. OneSpace offers unparalleled Mega Menu customisation and search functionality, both of which are paramount to a successful intranet design. We work with you to understand the structure of your organisation to best maximise your intranet content and links.

What's the common theme? Each aspect of design are carefully thought through and aree all user-centric, and functional. The simple fact is that people come to their organisational intranet to help perform their roles and get work done. Whether that is to find information pertaining to their role, to complete a task, or connect with people that can help them a good intranet design must have the end user in mind to facilitate the ease of sharing and accessing content.

Read more on the functionalities and design capabilities of OneSpace intranet-in-a-box solution here.