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The importance of user experience design to your intranet

Punchkick Interactive
  • Punchkick Interactive
  • March 29, 2016
The importance of user experience design to your intranet

When many people think of user experience, the first thing that comes to mind is customer experience. The typical “users” are assumed to be external to the company, and their experience is prioritized because it means boosted conversion, wider adoption, and more customer-generated revenue.

However, usability is equally important for internal systems, where the users in question are actually employees at the same company as the stakeholders themselves. Company intranets, databases, content management systems, and wikis are all critical to the productivity of an organization, and productivity is just as intricately tied to profitability as the money coming in the door from customers.

Ironically, it’s enterprise systems that often struggle most with poor user experience. Because of their size and complexity, just packing in all the necessary information is a massive challenge on its own, let alone worrying about ease of use and navigability. As organizations grow and demands on the system change, stakeholders tack new functionality on to the existing system, since a holistic redesign of everything seems too daunting and not nearly as pressing as external initiatives. It’s the perfect storm that creates a veritable Frankenstein of a system, owned by nobody and feared by all.

These monsters have wreaked havoc on employee productivity for decades. In 2012, the average success rate for employees completing simple tasks on an intranet was only 74%1. Employees couldn’t figure out how to complete almost a quarter of the basic tasks. Plus, if that weren’t scary enough, 74% is almost the exact same success rate as ten years before in 2002. Over the course of a decade of technological innovation, navigability did not improve at all. (And we’re betting that a good portion of those systems studied in 2012 probably still haven’t gotten a redesign.) For the 74% of tasks that employees did eventually complete, it took them an average of 2 minutes and 46 seconds per task. Considering that the goal of an intranet is to support dozens of daily tasks, that time really adds up.

Research shows that companies stand to gain a lot by focusing on their internal tools. The average Fortune 1000 company could bump annual revenue by over $2 billion just by improving internal data accessibility by 10%2. Imagine trying to generate that same amount of revenue from customers alone.

User experience is not just a luxury or a nice-to-have for internal systems. More and more, research is revealing how critical UX is to profitability.

Download our whitepaper for more information on the ROI of UX.


  1. Read the original Nielsen Norman Group research on intranet usability here. ↩︎
  2. This study was originally conducted by Sybase and UT Austin. ↩︎

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