Upcoming Intranet TrendsTrend Watch 2015

Here’s what we think is going to be the next big trends in intranet

design.

Upcoming Trends

Design Trends

• The return of textures and depth

• The death of Arial

User Experience

• Long scroll pages become standard

• KPIs are everywhere

• Micro-interactions

• Responsive is required

TREND OVERVIEW

Content

• News replaces blogs

• Content Analytics for content authors

• Automatic and simple content targeting

Collaboration

• A hybrid publishing-collaboration model will exist for executing and sharing departmental work

Design Trends

Visual design trends we expect to see more of in the next year.

• In 2014 Google presented their Material Design concept. Their goal was to provide a visual language that combined ux principles and innovation.

• We expect that the design community will be heavily influenced by the goals and principles being advocated by Google and anticipate a migration away from flat design and to a design aesthetic that includes more texture, layers and depth

TEXTURES & DEPTH

Eye Candy

• 3 years ago it was almost impossible to consider NOT using Arial, given the choices of ubiquitous fonts

• With the advances in the CSS and HTML standards, developers and designers have sudden access to any font face

• And we expect to see a lot more exciting typography

DEATH OF ARIALGeorgia

Times New Roman

Arial

Comic Sans

Lucida

Tahoma

Trebuchet

Verdana

User Experience

How the interactions and layout of content will evolve in the coming years

• Across the industry, we’ve seen the concept of “above the fold” abandoned.

• Designers still want the most critical content to appear at the top of the page, but we’re also confident that users are going to explore pages by scrolling before they’ll navigate.

• Our better educated user community has freed us from the fear that no one will see anything below the initial view of the screen that is loaded.

LONG SCROLL PAGES

• Within the business community, a strong emphasis is being put on transparency from senior levels.

• At the same time, the importance of how each individual employee’s contributions support the organizations’ mission is on the rise.

• We see the role of Key Performance Indicators becoming more prominent to not only communicate what executives are doing, but also to encourage employees to take action to support organizational goals.

KPIS ARE EVERYWHERE

• Micro-interactions are super easy, lightweight interactions that are prevalent across apps today

• Although today we only see “Like” and “Rate” micro-interactions on intranets, we expect to see more of them supported by the most popular intranet platforms – IBM, Liferay, Microsoft etc..

MICRO-INTERACTIONS

• “Responsive” is a requirement we’re seeing more and more on RFPs.

• In the coming months, we’re anticipating that will no longer be an explicit requirement and instead becomes implied for every new intranet build

RESPONSIVE IS REQUIRED

Content

How intranet content will evolve in the coming years

• Organizations know a lot more about the visitors to their intranets that they know about the visitors to their websites.

• We expect that this information will begin to be leveraged to provide tailored, relevant News and Updates to users

• Following this, we expect to see users begin to demand more targeted efforts across all content

CONTENT TARGETING

• It’s rare that we come across a group of intranet content authors that have an idea of how their efforts on the intranet impact others lives

• We anticipate the deployment of content analytics tools to provide insight to content authors and keep them motivated to keep their content up to date and relevant

CONTENT ANALYTICS FOR CONTENT AUTHORS

• Blogs within the intranet are, from our experience, frequently abandoned as authors have different, higher priorities arise in their work-lives

• As well, the perception of a blog being an opinion and a somewhat fluffy resource can work against it

• We’re seeing a return to the emphasis on News feeds within organizations: they may contain the same information, but it’s generally presented as facts and needed info

NEWS REPLACES BLOGS

Collaboration Trends

Changing how people will collaborate

• Until now, the place where a user collaborated on a document was very different from the place where they published content

• Within organizations, there exists large units of people – projects, divisions, departments – that require a hybrid model that allows them to establish and publish content while providing places for this content to be developed.

• We anticipate a demand for this hybrid model in the coming years

HYBRID PUBLISHING-COLLABORATION MODEL

These intranet trends are ones we’re happy to kiss goodbye.

Dying Trends

• There’s a great deal of advantage to the flat designs that are being advocated within the web community.

• The elements are faster to display, quicker to download and respond more easily

• But, as we’ve observed earlier in this presentation, the flat feel is quickly becoming perceived as dated. And since technology has made significant advances in the storage, transmission and display of image variants, we expect to see the constraint disappear.

Check out this engaging comparison of Realism vs Flat

FLAT AND BOXY DESIGN

• In 2014, Nielsen Norman’s Intranet Design Annual report listed carousels as a useful way to settle political disputes.

• In our experience, designers apply a carousel to do just this. And we’re think that’s silly: the compromise passes internal disagreements to intranet visitors.

• We advocate the settling of these disputes prior to intranet design and think our clients are getting wise to these compromise tactics.

OVERUSED UX ELEMENTS: Carousels

• Fat footers are typically used to repeat the navigation that appears in the header. The justification for this technique is that “users will have to scroll to the top of the page to get back to the navigation”

• The cost of a fat footer is that it prevents users from quickly getting to the bottom of a page using their keyboard.

• We expect to see usability sanity win out in the fat footer competition in the coming months.

OVERUSED UX ELEMENTS: Fat Footer

Footer

THANK YOU!