Here’s All You Need to Know About Designing an Intranet Portal
What Is an Intranet Portal?
An intranet portal is a digital workplace that connects employee information and data through customized social media-style channels and communities backed by cloud applications. The intranet portal facilitates knowledge sharing and communication with colleagues, customers, and partners.
About 74% of organizations evaluate that effective knowledge management disciplines boost company productivity by about 10-40%. The shift from individual contributor to team management and office collaboration has brought intranet portal design to the forefront of corporate strategy.
Designing an Intranet Portal? Must-Have Intranet Portal Features for Your Business,
An intranet portal is a primary tool for enabling collaboration throughout your organization and a central location to store and access shareable resources. But how can you be sure you’re choosing the right portal for your needs?
How should a portal be designed for optimal user experience? What are the best intranet portal features for your business? Here are answers to these questions and more:
1. We all know that an intranet should reflect your organization’s brand identity, but did you know that other factors can impact whether or not employees use it? Employees are more likely to use an intranet if they believe it will make them more productive at work and help improve their performance.
2. Your portal should be focused on content management and user experience. The interface should be simple and clean, with straightforward navigation and intuitive search functionality.
3. Before building your intranet portal, develop a plan outlining how employees will use it and how it will benefit your business goals. An intranet portal strategy should also consider your business goals and objectives.
4. It should be easy to navigate and use if it’s for your employees. For customer-facing sites, you can add more dynamic content that will keep users engaged and coming back again and again.
5. A responsive design adapts automatically to different screen sizes (desktop/tablet/mobile). This makes it easier for users who access the intranet on various devices, such as smartphones or tablets.
How to Design an Intranet Portal That Is Accessible to All?
The intranet portal is the first point of access to your company’s internal resources. It should be easy to use, intuitive, and provide an overview of what’s available to employees.
1. HR Documents and Forms
Intranet portals are a great place to store HR documents, policies, procedures, and forms. They’re accessible to all employees and can be accessed anytime, anywhere.
Employee self-help portals are one of the most critical resources for new hires because they contain all the information about benefits packages, vacation time, sick days, dress code guidelines, and more. You can also include other policies or procedures that affect employees’ daily lives.
While designing an intranet portal, ensure you include employe self-help portals. Intranet Portals with self-help features promote employee adoption of the intranet.
The portal also gives you access to productivity tools designed to help you stay connected with colleagues inside and outside your organization. Hence, you can communicate and collaborate using the portal instead of waiting on emails.
2. News, Events, and Announcements
Newsletters can provide regular updates about company news and events. They’re also a great way to keep employees up-to-date with industry trends through articles from outside sources that you share on your portal.
Publications include annual reports, goals, product brochures, and more — anything that helps employees learn more about what’s happening within the company or industry. One of the most significant benefits of an Intranet is that it allows your organization to share information about its core values, strategies, and other corporate communication with all employees.
For example, if you’re launching a new product line or service, your intranet can serve as a central hub where employees can learn about the new offering and how it fits into your overall strategy for growth.
3. Communication Tools (Chat, Announcements, Discussion Forums)
Chat rooms may be open to all employees or restricted to particular groups within the organization. For example, you might use instant messaging for customer service representatives to communicate with customers who need help right away.
Discussion forums allow users to ask questions and share information about topics that interest them. They’re great for sharing knowledge across departments and teams because they allow people from different areas of expertise to interact with each other.
4. Departments/Project Spaces
Create different sections for each department or project space in your company, allowing them to easily share files and information with other departments or projects through the intranet portal.
You should provide areas for each department or project so that they have their own space on which they can post content related only to them (for example, a project management board).
5. Company Communication Tools (Company Directory)
While designing an intranet portal, you should ensure that your company directory (organizational chart) includes contractors and temporary workers. Your intranet portal should allow employees to view each other’s profiles and contact information (e.g., email addresses).
It can also include a calendar where employees can schedule meetings with each other online. The most common format for this type of portal is SharePoint, which offers functionality similar to Microsoft Outlook.
While Designing an Intranet Portal, Make sure its user friendly.
1. Your navigation should be consistent across all pages so users stay aware of the location when moving from one site section to another. It also helps to group related pages so users can see all the content relating areas in one place.
2. You should also provide an intelligent search feature, automatically filtering out irrelevant results and presenting only relevant ones to your user’s query. This means that as soon as they start typing in a query, they get results that are relevant to them, not just anyone who has ever used your intranet portal before.
3. If you want your intranet portal to be successful, it’s essential that employees feel comfortable using it right away. One way to achieve this goal is by leveraging user profiles and directories so employees can easily find colleagues they need or locate specific information without having to search dozens of pages or scroll through endless lists of documents and files.
4. The homepage is the first thing users see when they enter your portal. It’s also the first thing they click on when they want to go elsewhere. So, it’s essential to make a great first impression.
5. Allow users to create their profiles with their photos and upload documents and files they want to share with others in the same department or team.
6. You can also integrate social media platforms into your intranet portal. This will allow people to access their Facebook, Twitter, and other accounts from the intranet portal. This gives them a sense of familiarity and comfort when using your intranet portal.
7. Publish comprehensive help articles that explain how things work in your organization and provide tips on how people can use their time more effectively. It’s a place where all your employees can go whenever they have any questions or concerns about work-related situations, policies, and procedures.
Conclusion
Implementing an Intranet portal becomes essential with the number of employees growing in your organization. And designing an intranet portal is the key to user adoption.
Neologix can help you custom designing an Intranet Portal. You can focus on what you do best as a company, interacting with customers, driving sales, and other business-related tasks. We can help you in designing an intranet portal.
Neologix can help you create a customized SharePoint intranet portal. We can help you brand your SharePoint intranet as per your branding guidelines. Please get in touch with us to develop your own customised SharePoint Intranet Portal.
